Section: Overall Objectives

Decentralized personalization

Our first objective is to offer full-fledged personalization in notification systems. Today, almost everyone is suffering from an overload of information that hurts both users and content providers. This suggests that not only will notification systems take a prominent role but also that, in order to be useful, they should be personalized to each and every user depending on her activity, operations, posts, interests, etc. In the Gossple implicit instant item recommender, through a simple interface, users get automatically notified of items of interest for them, without explicitly subscribing to feeds or interests. They simply have to let the system know whether they like the items they receive (typically through a like/dislike button). Throughout the system's operation the personal data of users is stored on their own machines, which makes it possible to provide a wide spectrum of privacy guarantees while enabling cross-application benefits.

Our goal here is to provide a fully decentralized solution without ever requiring users to reveal their private preferences.