Enhancing Children’s Experience with Recommendation Systems

Recommender Systems (RSs) offer a personalized support in exploring large amounts of information, assisting users in decision making about products matching their taste and preferences. Most of the research todate on recommender systems have focused on traditional users, i.e., adult individuals who are able to offer explicit feedback, write reviews, or purchase items themselves. However, children's patterns of attention and interaction are quite different from those of adults. This paper presents the first results of a research-in-progress that can be suited to bridge the barrier between children and a recom-mender system by providing a child-friendly interaction paradigm. Specifically, a web application is developed that employs real-time object recognition on movie thumbnails or DVD cover-photos in a real-time manner. The tangible object can be manipulated by the user and provide input to the system for the purpose of generating movie recommendations. We plan to extend this work to the scenario where the child could ask for a video content showing a related toy (e.g., a car, a plane, the doll of a character that she likes in a cartoon) and the system could generate the videos that matches these implicit preferences expressed by the child