Film recommendation system

Software	OO language such as PHP or JSP, plus HTML and CSS
Covers	Databases, web-based interfaces, AI, possibly statistics
Skills Required	Programming, interest in artificial intelligence, interest in movies
Challenge	Conceptual ??? Technical ???? Programming ????

Brief Description

What films do you want to buy at your local DVD store, or rent from services such as LoveFilm, or watch when you see them in the week's TV schedules? How do you know what's good, or will fit your current mood?

Your mission, in this project, is to develop a system that will generate recommendations of films to watch according to what the users say they want, and/or advice on whether a particular film is something you want to see, according to how other users have rated them. Like many successful web-based enterprises, the system will get its power from user-generated content and the effectiveness of crowdsourcing methods for generating assessments.

The challenges in developing this system include the following:

Coming up with good ways to ask users to rate films so that other users can find what suits their own preferences and moods. One way to do this might be to get users to rate films according to various attributes that can be used to relate films to moods or the desire to have films with particular attributes. Getting this to work would require a lot of careful thought or research on picking effective rating terms. Another way might be to get users to make pairwise comparisons between films, which might be easier and more informative and reliable than assigning absolute ratings, as well as being good for 'one like this' type requests.
Coming up with ways to use the rating information that your users give you to come up with recommendations for users. There is potentially unlimited scope for developing rating and matching methods.
Coming up with ways to present the recommendation information to users.

Variants

You could do this for music CDs, or books.

Extension

You might like to do this commercially when you graduate, and get rich. DMU will want a cut.

Back to