Denis Parra Santander

Hi! Welcome to my page at SIS at Pitt.

My name is Denis Parra-Santander and I am a graduate student at the Phd Program in Information Science and Technoloy at the University of Pittsburgh. My main research interests are Adaptive Hypermedia, Recommender Systems and Social Network Analysis. My advisor is Dr. Peter Brusilovsky, a recognized researcher specially in the areas of Adaptive Hypermedia Systems and User Modeling.

These are a set of topics I care and I wanted to plot them to see how they evolve in news streams. Let's see how they go!

This summer 2012 I attended 3 conferences: AVI in Capri, Hypertext in Milwaukee, and RecSys12 at Dublin. Check the pics!

From 23rd to 27th of October I participated in the Conference of Recommender Systems #recsys2011 in Chicago. I presented a paper in the Context-Aware Recommenders (CARS) workshop,"Implicit Feedback Recommendation via Implicit-to-Explicit Ordinal Logistic Regression Mapping" that I coauthored with Xavier Amatrian, Alexandros Karatzoglou and Idil Yavuz. If you are interested, you can see or download the slides from slideshare.

I have also given a presentation at our PAWS Lab at Pitt summarizing some papers of the conference. It is not very deep, but can help some attendees to refresh their memory, complementing the summary written by Xavier (who now is working in Netflix, California).

This Summer 2011 I am preparing for my comprehensive exam, but I have also assisted to the HCIL 2011 Symposium at UMD, the Classification Society Annual Meeting at CMU, and to the User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2011) conference. In this last one, held in Girona, Spain, I was awarded the 2nd best student paper award for the paper we co-authored with Dr. Xavier Amatriain titled "Walk the Talk: Analyzing the relation between implicit and explicit feedback for preference elicitation". You can download the paper and the slides.

In UMAP I met a bunch of very interesting people like Bart Knijnenburg, Alejandro Bellogin, Rikki Prince, and Karin Schöfegger, among others. In personal terms, it was very nice having 8(!) current and former members of our PAWS lab in the conference, we hanged out together during those days, as you can see in the pictures below. Special remarks for my colleague Sharon Hsiao who gave an spectacular presentation on Open Social student Modeling, and we also could celebrate her birthday during the conference.

This Summer 2010 I was a research intern at Telefonica I+D in Barcelona. I worked with Dr. Xavier Amatrian in mapping explicit to implicit behavior and we are running a user study with last.fm users until the end of November 2010. If you want to participate and have the chance to win a $600 Amazon gift card, click here.

It was a great time being there, because of the city, the company I was working on, and, of course, the people I met. If you speak Spanish, you can read the post wrote about it in my blog.

This Summer 2009 I am going to be doing a research internship at the School of Computer Science of the Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland (Eire). As I have been working in the latest months in developing tag-based aproaches for Recommender Systems, I am going to be working here on the application of Spreading Activation methods under the supervision of IBM researcher Dr. Alex Troussov.

I gave a presentation about Social Bookmarking Systems at Informatics Department at Southern University of Chile on Dec 17th 2008.

You can download it here: [here]