John Thomas Riedl (January 16, 1962 – July 15, 2013) was an American computer scientist and the McKnight Distinguished Professor at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...

. His published works include highly influential research on the

social web The social web is a set of social relations that link people through the World Wide Web. The social web encompasses how websites and software are designed and developed in order to support and foster social interaction. These online social inte ...

, recommendation systems, and collaborative systems.

Life and work

John Riedl received his B.S. in Mathematics from the

University of Notre Dame The University of Notre Dame du Lac, known simply as Notre Dame ( ) or ND, is a private Catholic university, Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, outside the city of South Bend, Indiana, South Bend. French priest Edward Sorin fo ...

in 1983 and his M.S. in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...

from

Purdue University Purdue University is a public land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and mone ...

in 1985. He completed his Ph.D. in

at Purdue University in 1990. He became an

assistant professor Assistant Professor is an academic rank just below the rank of an associate professor used in universities or colleges, mainly in the United States and Canada. Overview This position is generally taken after earning a doctoral degree A docto ...

at the

in 1990 and was promoted to associate professor in 1996 and again to professor in 2003. At the university, he led the GroupLens Research group. In 2012 he was awarded the McKnight Distinguished Professor position. During his time as a professor he advised 16 Ph.D. students who went on to take faculty positions and work at technology companies like

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

, PARC,

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 seri ...

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became ...

, and the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., or Wikimedia for short and abbreviated as WMF, is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best know ...

. He was also the faculty advisor for a long-running project in which twelve undergraduates each year would hone their entrepreneurial and software-development skills by taking charge of the development and maintenance of Chipmark, an online bookmark-sharing service. He was a founder of the field of

recommender systems A recommender system, or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing 'system' with a synonym such as platform or engine), is a subclass of information filtering system that provide suggestions for items that are most pertinent to a particular ...

, social computing, and interactive intelligent user interface systems. In 1996, he co-founded Net Perceptions to commercialize recommender systems research, which had "an enormous impact on e-commerce and information portals." At the height of the

dot-com bubble The dot-com bubble (dot-com boom, tech bubble, or the Internet bubble) was a stock market bubble in the late 1990s, a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, the Nasdaq Compo ...

, Net Perceptions was valued at $1.5 billion and had over 300 employees, but the company was liquidated in 2004. Riedl died on July 15, 2013, after three years with melanoma.

Honors and awards

Riedl was honored with the ACM Software System Award in 2010 for his work on recommender systems. He was named an

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing * ...

in 2009 and was also named an

IEEE Fellow As of 2019, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 5,082 members designated Fellow, each of whom is associated with one of the 41 societies under the IEEE. The Fellow grade of membership is the highest level of membershi ...

in 2012. He received numerous awards for his conference publications including best papers at CSCW, IUI, and WikiSym. He has also received commendations for his teaching, including the Outstanding Teacher Award at the University of Minnesota four times (1990–1993, 2010–2011) and the George Taylor Award for Exceptional Contributions to Teaching (1995–96).

Publications

Highly cited articles

* * *

References

External links