Tutorial on using social trust for recommender systems

Abstract

As the Web has shifted to an interactive environment where vast amounts of content is created by users, the question of whom to trust and what information to trust has become both more important and more difficult to answer. At the same time, social networks have become very popular with over a billion accounts shared across hundreds of networks. Social trust relationships, derived from social networks, are uniquely suited to speak to the quality of online information; recommender systems are designed to personalize, sort, aggregate, and highlight information. Merging social networks, trust, and recommender systems can improve the accuracy of recommendations and improve the user's experience. In this tutorial, we will cover the use of social trust in recommender systems. Topics including the computation of trust in social networks, integration of trust into recommender systems, and a discussion of when trust offers benefits and the challenges it presents.