/mit/dmaltz/latex/epsf

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science May 1994 May 12, 1994

Karen SollinsResearch Scientist, Laboratory for Computer Science David GoldbergMember of the Research Staff, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

Frederick R. MorgenthalerChairman, Departmental Committee on Graduate Students

Distributing Information for Collaborative Filtering on Usenet Net News

David A. Maltz

• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Introduction
  • A glimpse of the future
  • Systems for filtering
    • Drawbacks of current filtering systems
    • Collaboration as a method for filtering
  • Systems for collaborative filtering
    • Where are we?
• Problem Statement
  • Desired system functionality
  • System constraints
  • Summary of the solution
    • Where are we?
• Issues in Design
  • Providing levels of accessibility
  • Controlling the costs of collaborative filtering
  • Respecting social conventions of the Usenet
  • Hooking in the collaborative filter
  • Behaviors of Net News Users
    • Obtaining data on user behavior
    • Trends in the data
      • Where are we?
• Design Architecture
  • Votes
    • Type of information exchanged by vote servers
  • Vote sources
    • Naming vote sources
  • Interface module
    • Specification of the Application Program Interface
  • Vote server
    • Accumulating votes into summaries
    • Interface module communication with vote server
    • How vote servers exchange information
  • Security and privacy of the system
  • Maintenance mechanisms
  • Comparison of system with design criteria
• Results and Conclusions
  • Implemented system
    • Time line for development
    • The news reader clients
    • Modifications to the xrn news reader
    • Modifying the nn news reader
  • Results
  • Conclusions
  • Future work
• Vote Server Communication Protocol
  • AVAIL - what groups have votes available
  • GROUP - fetch all votes for articles in group
  • VOTES - cast votes for articles
  • QUIT - break connection
• References
• About this document ...