This week MyStrands was very pleased to provide a video presentation to be used for a keynote address opening the SIRTEL 2007 (Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning) workshop. This workshop was held In conjuction with the 2nd European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL’07) in Crete, Greece.

While MyStrands’ presenters Jim Shur and Rick Hangartner sat a stone’s throw from the foothills of Oregon’s coastal range, the workshop attendees were 10,448 kilometers away watching and discussing with them the video and its implications over Internet Chat. Thanks to Riina Vuorikari and all the SIRTEL organizers and participants for inviting us!

(We have uploaded the video to YouTube in four pieces (one, two, three, four), as we cannot upload the entire file at once. The entire video can be downloaded from here).

Abstract
Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) represents an interesting new application domain for Social Recommender Technology (SRT). Many, and perhaps most, successful applications of SRT to date have involved recommending media items and consumer goods. For these domains, the knowledge base for the recommender embodies relatively superficial preference semantics, derived as relatively simple statistics from implicit or explicit preference data. It seems the recommendation tasks in many TEL applications will benefit from, if not require, knowledge bases that embody deeper semantics than just statistically evaluated preferences. This talk explores this issue of the role of semantics in SRT recommenders for TEL applications. We propose that the science of how people learn can guide us in building knowledges bases for SRTs applied to TEL, and for that reason TEL applications might be viewed as an evolutionary step for SRTs that places a new emphasis on the science of making useful recommendations.

While the US went rafting during their offsite meeting, the BCN team trekked, canoed and went wild in the Pyrenees. Recognize some US team members in these pictures? They can’t resist a good party (more photos here).

Complex networks of human-generated links between items are the best mechanisms to analyze how our society considers and uses the products it creates and consumes. Although the resulting network is immense, it is a flexible tool for analysis and recommendation and is the foundation of MyStrands recommendations (read more).

This image is a way of visualizing a subset of UMA, our Ultimate Matrix of Associations.

We are happy to present MyStrands.TV… a free, personalized, Internet music television, with countless channels featuring great music videos and concert footage just for you.

Get ready to spend hours and hours in front of your computer. At MyStrands.TV you can watch an endless number of personalized videos with the simple click of a button – and easily share them with your friends. You can also watch Artist Channels, Genre Channels, and even User Channels. Yes, that’s right… you can watch channels that have been personalized for – and by – your friends, family, influencers and anyone else you come across.

Whether you have been lucky enough to attend concerts by artists like The Allman Brothers Band or you are among the millions of Avril Lavigne music video fans, or anything in between… MyStrands.TV has them and many other artists as well.

You can create an “Avril Lavigne-only channel” or you can build a channel of music videos and concerts of artists similar to Avril Lavigne. Or you can just ask MyStrands.TV to give you videos based on what you listen to. It’s up to you.

Features:

If you already have a MyStrands account then you just log into MyStrands.TV and start enjoying a music channel of music videos and concerts that are personalized specifically for you. Want to veer off course a little? Great, under the video player there is a selection that will help you select the next song in the playlist to be either: 1) From a Similar Artist, 2) From the Same Artist, or 3) From a Different (non-similar) Artist that we think you may also like. Away you go.

While you’re listening, bookmark your favorite videos or check out other people that have recently listened to the artist. Jump over to another recommended artist or recommended channel. It’s up to you… use it as an interactive video channel or just let it run in the background like radio.

If you don’t have a MyStrands account, and want to just try out MyStrands.TV before deciding whether to sign up, just type in the name of an artist and we’ll build a custom music video channel for you.

MyStrands.TV is powered by OpenStrands, MyStrands Public APIs and YouTube.

Enjoy!