18.03.2013Sven Seuken wins Google Faculty Research Award

Sven Seuken wins a Google Faculty Research Award for his research project on "Human Recommender Systems". The award amounts to $76,000 for one year.

Google writes the following about the awards program:

"...the Google Research Awards program aims to identify and support world-class, full-time faculty pursuing research in areas of mutual interest. Google Research Awards are one-year awards structured as unrestricted gifts to universities to support the work of world-class full-time faculty members at top universities around the world."

Sven Seuken will use the award to hire a new PhD student to start a new research project on "Human Recommender Systems." This is a novel research problem at the intersection of human computation, social networks, and recommender systems. The main idea is to combine the knowledge and cognitive abilities of humans with the computational power of computers, to design recommender systems that have higher user satisfaction than current systems. Such recomender systems can be used to recommend movies, books, restaurants, hotels, news articles, smartphone apps, essentially anything where users need help selecting items they will like from a sea of options. Students who are looking for a PhD position and who are interested in this research area are invited to apply.

Google faculty research awards are highly competitive, and this round, the Department of Informatics at the University of Zurich was the only Swiss institution to receive such an award.