A Tech Hybrid-Recommendation Engine and Personalized Notification: An integrated tool to assist users through Recommendations (Project ATHENA)

Abstract

Purpose – Project ATHENA aims to develop an application to address information overload, primarily focused on Recommendation Systems (RSs) with the personalization and user experience design of a modern system. Method – Two machine learning (ML) algorithms were used: (1) TF-IDF for Content-based filtering (CBF); (2) Classification with Matrix Factorization- Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) applied with Collaborative filtering (CF) and mean (normalization) for prediction accuracy of the CF. Data sampling in academic Research and Development (R&D) of Philippine Council for Agriculture, Aquatic, and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCAARRD) e-Library and Project SARAI publications plus simulated data used as training sets to generate a recommendation of items that uses the three RS filtering (CF, CBF, and personalized version of item recommendations). Series of Testing and TAM performed and discussed. Results – Findings allow users to engage in online information and quickly evaluate retrieved items produced by the application. Compatibility-testing (CoT) shows the application is compatible with all major browsers and mobile-friendly. Performance-testing (PT) recommended v-parameter specs and TAM evaluations results indicate strongly associated with overall positive feedback, thoroughly enough to address the information-overload problem as the core of the paper. Conclusion – A modular architecture presented addressing the information overload, primarily focused on RSs with the personalization and design of modern systems. Developers utilized Two ML algorithms and prototyped a simplified version of the architecture. Series of testing (CoT and PT) and evaluations with TAM were performed and discussed. Project ATHENA added a UX feature design of a modern system. Recommendations – High-end hardware specs of v-Parameter are recommended, at least 8-cores of vCPU with 16GiB of memory and sufficient driver-type size to run the model and End-to-end jobs execution for continuously maintaining the application. Research Implications – Future Developers must use/integrate a large dataset. Other ML approaches can expand Hybrid-RS better. Implicit data and additional filtering methods may enhance the application in the future.