As the exponential growth of information generated on the World Wide Web, Social Recommendation has emerged as one of the hot research topics recently. Social Recommendation forms a specific type of information filtering technique that attempts to suggest information (blogs, news, music, travel plans, web pages, images, tags, etc.) that are likely to interest the users. Social Recommendation involves the investigation of collective intelligence by using computational techniques such as machine learning, data mining, natural language processing, etc. on social behavior data collected from blogs, wikis, recommender systems, question & answer communities, query logs, tags, etc. from areas such as social networks, social search, social media, social bookmarks, social news, social knowledge sharing, and social games. In this tutorial, we will introduce Social Recommendation and elaborate on how the various characteristics and aspects are involved in the social platforms for collective intelligence. Moreover, we will discuss the challenging issues involved in Social Recommendation in the context of theory and models of social networks, methods to improve recommender systems using social contextual information, ways to deal with partial and incomplete information in the social context, scalability and algorithmic issues with social computational techniques.

Irwin King
Dr. King's research interests include machine learning, web intelligence & social computing, and multimedia processing. In these research areas, he has over 200 technical publications in journals (JMLR, ACM TOIS, IEEE TNN, Neurocomputing, NN, IEEE BME, PR, IEEE SMC, JAMC, JASIST, IJPRAI, DSS, etc.) and conferences (NIPS, IJCAI, CIKM, SIGIR, KDD, PAKDD, ICDM, WWW, WI/IAT, WCCI, IJCNN, ICONIP, ICDAR, etc.). In addition, he has contributed over 20 book chapters and edited volumes. Moreover, Dr. King has over 30 research and applied grants. One notable system he has developed is the VeriGuide System, previously known as the CUPIDE (Chinese University Plagiarism IDentification Engine) system, which detects similar sentences and performs readability analysis of text-based documents in both English and in Chinese to promote academic integrity and honesty.

Dr. King is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks (TNN) and IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (CIM). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Open Information Systems Journal, Journal of Nonlinear Analysis and Applied Mathematics, and Neural Information Processing–Letters and Reviews Journal (NIP-LR). He has also served as Special Issue Guest Editor for Neurocomputing, International Journal of Intelligent Computing and Cybernetics (IJICC), Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (JIIS), and International Journal of Computational Intelligent Research (IJCIR). He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM, International Neural Network Society (INNS), and Asian Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA). Currently, he is serving the Neural Network Technical Committee (NNTC) and the Data Mining Technical Committee under the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (formerly the IEEE Neural Network Society). He is also a member of the Board of Governors of INNS and a Vice-President and Governing Board Member of APNNA.

Michael R. Lyu
Dr. Michael R. Lyu is currently a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a Technical Staff Member from 1988 to 1990. From 1990 to 1992 he was with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Iowa as an Assistant Professor. From 1992 to 1995, he was a Member of the Technical Staff in the Applied Research Area of the Bell Communications Research, Bellcore. From 1995 to 1997 he was a research Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, which was first part of AT&T, and later became part of Lucent Technologies.

Dr. Lyu’s research interests include software reliability engineering, distributed sys- tems, fault-tolerant computing, web technologies, mobile networks, digital video library, multimedia processing, and video searching and delivery. He has participated in more than 30 industrial projects in these areas, and helped to develop many commercial systems and software tools. He has been frequently invited as a keynote or tutorial speaker to conferences and workshops in U.S., Europe, and Asia.

Dr. Lyu has published over 300 refereed journal and conference papers in his research areas. He initiated the first International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE) in 1990. He was the Program Chair for ISSRE’96, Program co-Chair for WWW10, General Chair for ISSRE’2001, General co-Chair for PRDC’2005, and has served in pro- gram committees for many conferences. He is the editor for two book volumes: Software Fault Tolerance, published by Wiley in 1995 and the Handbook of Software Reliability Engineering, published by IEEE and McGraw-Hill in 1996. These books have received an overwhelming response from both the academia and the industry. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Reliability, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, and Journal of Information Science and Engineering. He is currently on the editorial board of Wiley Software Testing, Verification and Reliability Journal. He was elected to IEEE Fellow (2004) and AAAS Fellow (2007) for his contributions to software reliability engineering and software fault tolerance. He was also named Croucher Senior Research Fellow in 2008.

Dr. Lyu received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from National Taiwan University in 1981, his M.S. in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1985, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles in 1988.

Hao Ma

Dr. Hao Ma received his Ph.D. degree from Department of Computer Science and Engineer- ing, The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2009. Before that, he received B.Eng. and M.Eng. degree in School of Information Science and Engineering from Central South Uni- versity, in 2002 and 2005, respectively. He worked as a System Engineer in Intel Shanghai before he joined CUHK as a Ph.D student in November 2006.

Dr. Ma’s research interests include Information Retrieval, Data Mining, Machine Learn- ing, Social Network Analysis and Recommender System. He has published more than 10 high quality papers in international conference, including SIGR, CIKM, RecSys, etc. He is serving or has served as program committee in several international conferences and workshops, e.g., CIKM, ICC, GlobeCom, WCNC, etc.