Nevena Dragovic, a M.S. in Computer Science student at Boise State, has her poster “Exploiting Reviews to Generate Recommendations and Corresponding Explanation to Guide Users’ Selections” accepted for presentation at the 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, to be held October 14th-16th in Houston, TX. Nevena’s submission is the first of any Boise State student to be accepted for this conference and was accepted despite a 32% increase in poster submissions this year.
Nevena describes the project, which originated as part of CS 597 – Information Retrieval, as a tool that determines what matters most to reviewers by the reviews they give, and then highlights those same important aspects for them in other reviews. For example, on a review site like TripAdvisor, a reviewer may make reviews that often focus on aspects of the environment at coffee shops such as, “The place had the perfect noise level” or “I loved the decor.” The tool picks up on this and when the reviewer goes to look for new coffee shop, the tool highlights the reviews that talk about the environment or ambiance. Together with Dr. Sole Pera, Nevena intends to submit this project and poster to other conferences, including the premier RecSys conference in Vienna.
This will be Nevena’s first time attending the Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. She’s excited at the opportunity of presenting her poster to many of those attending (over 12,000 attendees from over 50 countries) as well as participating herself in the quality learning and networking available. She, along with several other members of the ACM-W chapter at Boise State, are still waiting to see if they’ve been granted Grace Hopper Celebration scholarships to attend but there’s hope that funding will be made available for most through ASBSU and the CS department as there has in previous years.
After receiving Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Belgrade (Serbia) and Lewis and Clark State College, Nevena was looking for small CS Master’s programs where she’d benefit from focused support. She’s been pleased with the help she’s received and surprised by all the opportunities she’s had. Nevena serves as a Graduate Assistant in the CS department and recently accepted a summer intern position at Micron Technology as a Business Intelligence Analyst.