Jérôme Baton started hacking computers at the age of skin problems, gaming first then continued his trip by self-learning Basic on Amstrad CPC, peaking on coding a full screen horizontal starfield, and messing the interlace of the video controller so that sprites appeared twice as high in horizontal beat'em up games. Disks were three inches for 178 Kb then. Then, for gaming reasons, he switched to Commodore Amiga and its fantastic AMOS Basic. Later caught by seriousness and studies, he wrote Turbo Pascal, C, COBOL, Visual C++, and Java on PCs and mainframes at university, and even Logo in high school. Then, Java happened and he became a consultant, mostly on backend code of websites in many different businesses. Jérôme authored several articles in French on Neo4j, JBoss Forge, an Arduino workshop for Devoxx4Kids, and reviewed kilos of books on Android. He has a weakness for wordplay, puns, spoonerisms, and Neo4j that relieves him from join(t) pains. Jérôme also has the joy to teach in French universities, currently at I.U.T de Paris, Université Paris V - René Descartes (Neo4j, Android), and Université de Troyes (Neo4j), where he does his best to enterTRain the students. When not programming, Jérôme enjoys photography, doing electronics, everything DIY, understanding how things work, trying to be clever or funny on Twitter, and spends a lot of time trying to understand his kids and life in general.
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Social networking systems
Obviously, there are a lot of recommender systems that will be very specific to a domain. In the past couple of years, with the massive rise of social networking tools and social apps all around us, the interest in social recommender systems has grown massively. Essentially, we are looking to make useful new connections between people that are effectively part of the same social circle, but may not have realized it yet.
Looking at the following sample network should clarify this immediately:
A social networking graph
In the preceding simple network, there is a very high likelihood that we can close some friendship loops very easily, by suggesting connections between new links between people. Very often, we will be using the graph theory principle of triadic closures, meaning that we will be closing the missing links of the triangles in the structure of our network.
So let's explore this social networking use case some more in the following chapter with a very specific...