A bit of new technology has emerged from a partnership between AOL and New York-based Cornell Tech.
Last week, AOL and the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech announced in a press statement they had come up with something called immersive recommendations technology. This would let users opt in to use their personal digital information from one platform to better inform content recommendations for them on another platform.
For instance, the recommendations software might draw on users’ Twitter data to suggest movies to watch for first-time users of Netflix. Likewise, users’ posts on publishing platform Medium could be paired with Meetup.com to find events.
This is the first technology to emerge from the Connected Experiences Lab collaboration between Cornell Tech and AOL, which aims to develop ideas in digital technology. Though the engineering campus being built on Roosevelt Island is still years away from completion, a number of academic and research efforts from Cornell Tech have been underway in office space supplied by Google. The first buildings of the permanent campus are expected to open in 2017.
AOL and the university said in the statement they developed the immersive recommendations technology as a means to get users interested in relevant content when they begin using a new platform for the first time.
A pair of websites were set up to demo the immersive recommendations, with Newsfie recommending articles from Medium, and Grouplink recommending meetups. AOL said in the statement it plans to explore using the technology with some of its content divisions.
