An Amrita research paper titled, Recommending Customizable Products: A Multiple Choice Knapsack Solution, was presented at the 5th International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining & Semantics (WIMS ’15), Limassol, Cyprus from July 13-14, 2015. The paper was authored by Aravind Sivaramakrishnan and Madhusudhan Krishnamachari, both students of B.Tech. Computer Science and Engineering 2011-’15 batch, under the guidance of Prof. Vidhya Balasubramanian, Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore. The paper was the result of over one and a half years of research work conducted as part of the research projects that fall under the umbrella of the Amrita Multi-Dimensional Analytics (AMuDA) Lab. A financial aid of $850 was provided as an initiative to attend the conference and present their work at WIMS ’15.
“Overall, the conference was a very enlightening experience. It was a chance to interact with some of the best researchers in the field, and gain some insights into where some of the current research work is being conducted. Linked data, Recommender Systems and the Semantic Web were some of the major topics covered,” shared the students.
The International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining & Semantics (WIMS ’15) was organized under the auspices of the University of Cyprus. This is the fifth in a new series of conferences concerned with intelligent approaches to transform the World Wide Web into a global reasoning and semantics-driven computing machine.
The conference keynote, What you Tweet is What You Get: Challenges and Opportunities for Social Media Analysis in Industry, was delivered by Dr. Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield. It covered some of the opportunities for research in the field of Social Media Analysis, and Web Intelligence in Social Media. A session on Ontologies and Linked Semantic Data seemed to be a recurrent theme that came up during all the sessions. The day concluded with a session on Semantic Search and Information Retrieval, where state-of-the art work in the field, including modelling and predicting user search behavior, and improving semantic search through entity based document ranking were presented. After the first day’s presentations came to an end, the conference participants were taken to a local restaurant for a taste of the local cuisine.
On Day 2, the keynote session on Understanding the Tribal Web was delivered by Prof. Nikolay Mehandjiev, University of Manchester. It was followed by sessions on Web Mining and Linked Data Mining. The penultimate session of the day was on Recommender Systems, where the Amrita students presented their work.
“It was very well received, and many of the conference dignitaries and participants commended the fact that undergraduate students were able to carry out such quality research work and present it at such a prestigious conference. Lots of feedback and suggestions were given about the work, and we hopefully will be able to incorporate this and take our work further,” the students explained.
The conference concluded with a session on The Web of Things, and a small farewell session afterwards.
“It was a great experience to attend an international conference and to be presenters at it. We’d like to thank firstly, Prof Vidhya Balasubramanian, without whom we would have never come this far, and the support provided by Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham for the same. We hope Amrita Multi-Dimensional Analytics (AMuDA) Lab will be able to motivate and facilitate many students like us to carry out top notch research work, attend even more prestigious conferences and leave their mark in the scientific community,” shared the euphoric students.
