# Topics > Projects >  Learning task preferences of users, Germany

## Airicist

Contributors:

University of Freiburg

Autonomous Intelligent Systems Group, University of Bonn 

www2.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~abdon/task_preferences.html

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## Airicist

Collaborative filtering for predicting user preferences for organizing objects

Published on Jan 9, 2016




> Work by Nichola Abdo, Cyrill Stachniss, Luciano Spinello, and Wolfram Burgard
> 
> The University of Freiburg, Department of Computer Science, Autonomous Intelligent Systems
> 
> The University of Bonn, Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation, Department of Photogrammetry 
> 
> Abstract:
> As service robots become more and more capable of performing useful tasks for us, there is a growing need to teach robots how we expect them to carry out these tasks. However, different users typically have their own preferences, for example with respect to arranging objects on different shelves. As many of these preferences depend on a variety of factors including personal taste, cultural background, or common sense, it is challenging for an expert to pre-program a robot in order to accommodate all potential users. At the same time, it is impractical for robots to constantly query users about how they should perform individual tasks. In this work, we present an approach to learn patterns in user preferences for the task of tidying up objects in containers, e.g., shelves or boxes. Our method builds upon the paradigm of collaborative filtering for making personalized recommendations and relies on data from different users that we gather using crowdsourcing. To deal with novel objects for which we have no data, we propose a method that compliments standard collaborative filtering by leveraging information mined from the Web. When solving a tidy-up task, we first predict pairwise object preferences of the user. Then, we subdivide the objects in containers by modeling a spectral clustering problem. Our solution is easy to update, does not require complex modeling, and improves with the amount of user data. We evaluate our approach using crowdsourcing data from over 1,200 users and demonstrate its effectiveness for two tidy-up scenarios. Additionally, we show that a real robot can reliably predict user preferences using our approach.

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## Airicist

Collaborative Filtering for Efficiently Predicting New User Preferences Based on the Perceived Scene

Published on Jan 9, 2016

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## Airicist

Article "Watch this service robot predict your organizing preferences"

by Nichola Abdo
January 18, 2016

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