Microsoft TechFest 2011 Summary: "Pushing Personalized News Directly to You" (Project Emporia)

From the Microsoft Research Community Blog:

Project Emporia, a second FUSE Labs project being featured during TechFest 2011, has received a bit of interest in recent months. Debuting on Dec. 7 during the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, the technology found its way into people’s hands a month later, when it was launched as an application for Windows Phone 7.
Ralf Herbrich, director of Cambridge-based FUSE Labs U.K., has overseen the project from the start, and he says it’s been gratifying—and educational—to see how it has been received.
“Since the seventh of January, there have been thousands of people using it every day,” he reports. “Everyone with a Windows Phone 7 has access to it, and since then, the population has grown. It’s been two very exciting months.”
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“We combine filtering with personalization, based on your individual preferences,” Herbrich explains. “In filtering, we have three dimensions that we think are easy and important. One of them is based on category, which requires us to assign categories to things shared on social streams, like Twitter. Second is topical keywords, and the third one is your social network, the set of people whose opinion you trust, or your extended social network.
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Emporia also is distinguished by its push delivery mechanism…

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