I'm doing some volunteer work for The Hole in the Wall Gang Camp's web site called "Hole in the Web". The purpose of the web site is to help maintain the camp community during the non-summer months. The web site is still under development by several organizations including some MIT students. Current features of the site include newsletters, a graffiti wall to share doodles, chat rooms, etc.
To help with this project, I decided to add a feature to the site that would allow campers to find other campers with similar tastes. I chose camp activities as the object of comparison. I'm using a simple mean squared difference (MSD) algorithm to perform the match. The tricky part, however, is the user interface since the site needs to be accessible by campers ages 7 through 17. Also, unlike other automated collaborative filtering (ACF) sites, the focus of this one is on making friends as opposed to making recommendations. Please try it!
