iDianNao: Recommending Volunteer Opportunities to Older Adults

Abstract

Older volunteers can provide valuable, needed services for communities and organizations. However, older people who wish to help often have difficulty finding the right volunteer opportunities. In this paper, we present an online system that exploits recommender system techniques to provide volunteer opportunities for older people. We rank the opportunities according to a weight sum of four scores, which are neighbor score, click score, time score, and area score.

For each opportunity, we first select the neighborhood of the user by considering preference similarity for the opportunity and the organization as well as the social interactions involved. We then compute the neighbor score as the ratio of neighbors choosing the target opportunity to all neighbors. The click score is calculated as the rate that an user clicks on the interested opportunity pages. The time and area scores indicate the availability of time and the ability to travel, respectively. For the particular volunteer opportunity recommendations, we further consider the coverage issue by adding a deadline factor when computing the opportunity score. At the end of the paper, we report the system implementation and provide a summary.