GroupLens also works with mobile and ubiquitous technologies, digital libraries, and local geographic information systems.

The lab has also gained notability for its members' work studying open content communities such as Cyclopath, a geo-wiki that was used in the Twin Cities to help plan the regional cycling system.

After they heard keynote speaker Shumpei Kumon talk about his vision for an information economy,[3] they began working on a collaborative filtering system for Usenet news.

This recommendation engine was one of the first automated collaborative filtering systems in which algorithms were used to automatically form predictions based on historical patterns of ratings.

In summer 1995 the team gathered Bradley Miller, David Maltz, Jon Herlocker, and Mark Claypool for "Hack Week" to create the new implementation, and to plan the next round of experiments.

The GroupLens Research team, led by Brent Dahlen and Jon Herlocker, used this data set to jumpstart a new movie recommendation site called MovieLens which has been a very visible research platform, including a detailed discussion in a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell,[15] and a report in a full episode of ABC Nightline.

[21][22] In order to broaden the set of research ideas and tools they used, Riedl, Konstan, and Terveen invited colleagues in social psychology (Robert Kraut and Sara Kiesler, of the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute), and economic and social analysis (Paul Resnick and Yan Chen of the University of Michigan School of Information) to collaborate.

The new, larger team adopted the name CommunityLab, and looked generally at the effects of technological interventions on the performance of online communities.