In May 1996, GroupLens formed a commercial venture called Net Perceptions, which served clients that included E!
The GroupLens Research team, led by Brent Dahlen and Jon Herlocker, used this data set to jumpstart a new movie recommendation site, which they chose to call MovieLens.
Since its inception, MovieLens has become a very visible research platform: its data findings have been featured in a detailed discussion in a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell,[6] as well as a report in a full episode of ABC Nightline.
The preferences recorded by this survey allow the system to make initial recommendations, even before the user has rated a large number of movies on the website.
Users may also submit and rate tags (a form of metadata, such as "based on a book", "too long", or "campy"), which may be used to increase the film recommendations system's accuracy.
[13] Outside of the realm of movie recommendations, data from MovieLens has been used by Solution by Simulation to make Oscar predictions.
[8] The researchers saw that under-contribution seemed to be a problem for the community and set up a study to discern the most effective way to motivate users to rate and review more films.
Liu et al. used MovieLens data sets to test the efficiency of an improved random walk algorithm by depressing the influence of large-degree objects.