WHATSUP: A Decentralized Instant News Recommender

Abstract

We present WHATSUP, a collaborative filtering system for disseminating news items in a large-scale dynamic setting with no central authority. WHATSUP constructs an implicit social network based on user profiles that express the opinions of users about the news items they receive (like-dislike). Users with similar tastes are clustered using a similarity metric reflecting long-standing and emerging (dis)interests. News items are disseminated through a novel heterogeneous gossip protocol that (1) biases the orientation of its targets towards those with similar interests, and (2) amplifies dissemination based on the level of interest in every news item. We report on an extensive evaluation of WHATSUP through (a) simulations, (b) a ModelNet emulation on a cluster, and (c) a PlanetLab deployment based on real datasets. We show that WHATSUP outperforms various alternatives in terms of accurate and complete delivery of relevant news items while preserving the fundamental advantages of standard gossip: namely, simplicity of deployment and robustness.