Since 1992, the GroupLens Research Project has been exploring ways to use the opinions of a community of users to help each member more effectively filter content in a personalized way.  This talk reviews the history of the GroupLens project, including its Usenet News and MovieLens recommenders.  It focuses on major research results and experiments with new and different interfaces to support communities of recommender system users.  A variety of research papers on the topic can be found at www.grouplens.org, and MovieLens, our current research system, can be found at www.movielens.org.

Joseph A. Konstan is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota.His research addresses a variety of human-computer interaction issues related to filtering, comprehending, organizing, and automating large and complex data sets. He is probably best known for his work in collaborative filtering (the GroupLens recommender system) and multimedia authoring.  Dr. Konstan received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993; he is an ACM Lecturer, editor of the SIGCHI Bulletin, and a member of the ACM SIGCHI Executive Committee.