Adam Rae became the 9th KMi student in the last year to successfully defended their PhD thesis on Friday 4th November. His thesis is entitled “Exploiting Social Networks for Recommendation in Online Image Sharing Systems” and experimental work undertaken during his studies has produced systems that help users in systems like Flickr to add more relevant tags to their photos, as well as systems that recommend images to users, based on the people they know and how they interact with each other online. His work has also shed light on the role social data has to play in significantly improving recommendation tasks in other similar online media sharing systems.

His studies were part of an academic/industrial collaboration funded by an EPSRC CASE studentship under the supervision of Stefan Rüger and Suzanne Little in KMi, and Roelof van Zwol at Yahoo! Research Barcelona.

Adam now goes on to a postdoctoral research position in Yahoo where he is extending his work in multimedia information systems by investigating geographic context information.