Section: New Software and Platforms

AllYours-P2P: A distributed news recommender (former WhatsUp)

Participants : Heverson Borba Ribeiro, Raziel Carvajal Gomez, Davide Frey, Arnaud Jégou, Anne-Marie Kermarrec.

Within the context of the AllYours EIT/ICT-Labs project, we refined the implementation of WhatsUp into the Peer-to-Peer AllYours application. AllYours-P2P is a peer-to-peer based news recommender system that organizes users into an implicit social network based on their explicit opinions. In AllYours-P2P the recommendation process is collaboratively performed by connected users. Every user runs a symmetric piece of software responsible for storing user interests and calculating the affinity between a user and its neighborhood. The local computed similarity then is used to keep virtual connections to other users whose interests are alike and remove connection to the ones that are not. As a result, an interest-based overlay is built and users converge to groups of similar interests within which news are disseminated. The AllYours-P2P software consists of two parts, running on each peer: an embedded application server, based on Jetty, and a web interface accessible from any web browser. The back-end is written in Java, while the user interface comprises HTML and Javascript code. AllYours-P2P is currently available in three different platforms: Mac OSx (10.5 or later), Windows (Vista and Windows 7) and Linux (Ubuntu 10.4 or later). We have tested Allyours-p2p in a real life environment with a set of invited users in Italy from Sep to Nov 2014. These test were a part of joint project between ASAP Team and its Italian partner Trentorise.

Currently the implementation of Allyours-p2p includes approximately 21K lines of code.