GHC News: What’s Love Got to Do With IT?
Tackling the Technology of Romance
One of our favorite parts of the Grace Hopper Conference is the opening night Poster Sessions. Students and researchers are eager to talk about their work. The just-arrived crowds are happy to listen, and the promise of the week ahead animates the room. Fortified with cocktail shrimp and sensible shoes, we set out to tour row after row of fascinating presentations at GHC 2007. And we spot one that is, well, different. It’s called “The Algorithms of Love.” Love—at GHC? Really?
Four Temple University CIS students—Alanna Burke, Rebecca Mackin, Pauline Romas and Michelle Rufe — decided to explore online dating and the impact of computer technology on the business of love. Choosing four popular dating services: eHarmony.com, Match.com, Yahoo Personals and eChemistry, they examined strategies and technologies the services use to accomplish three principal processes: data gathering, matching and communication. They also determined hardware configurations, market demographics, trends and emerging technologies impacting the growing use of the computer to find that someone special.
The findings of the Temple study are indeed fascinating. In the U.S., spending for online dating will reach $642 million in 2008, with growth to nearly $1 billion forecast by 2011. About 40 million single Americans—40 percent of the country’s total single population—use online dating services. Dating service businesses employ one of two basic search strategies: scientific research, applied to complex matching algorithms based on extensive psychological profiling; or database search algorithms based on users preferred and prioritized criteria. Within those search strategies are a number of additional matching technologies to compare commonalities, weighted priorities or complementary traits. See Algorithms of Love poster. PDF 2MB
So it would seem that love and technology are, if not exactly a match made in heaven, at least soul mates in today’s Internet world.
In an informal roundtable discussion, we asked the women about their unconventional project.
What inspired you to undertake a study on this particular topic?
Rebecca: “The inspiration…was the accessibility and relevance of online dating in the U.S. today. I wanted to know why people thought that a computer, which lacks the ability to feel, could tell someone who they should love.”
Pauline: “…it represents a widely-known application of advanced networking and database technology, as well as a social tool for exploring human interactions.”
Alanna: “I saw an article online about online dating companies filing patents for their matching systems, and I wondered how this could be possible – how can you patent the way you match people?”
Michelle: “I was not particularly thrilled with the idea. After we began research, however, the topic became much more fascinating.
What difficulties did you encounter in gathering information or data for the project?
Michelle: The biggest problem was the relative newness of online dating…not many long-term studies have been done regarding the success rates of dating sites. [It caused us to] modify our research goals…”
Rebecca: “…the lack of support from the companies we were researching. Other than the patents we had found, there was very little information regarding how the companies went about matching people and how confident they were in their results.”
Pauline: “It was difficult to obtain the actual matching algorithms for the major websites, so instead we focused on gathering an understanding of these algorithms through the user-end interactions. The companies protect their actual code, but we managed to gain understanding of their basic functionality by posing as a customer, and also by reading documentation on their methods and success rates.”
Alanna: “We tried to get numbers from every source…whether it be a news article or the sites themselves.”
What was the most surprising or unexpected finding of your study?
Pauline: “The large amount of online dating sites catering to specific dating interests, such as “Sugar daddies looking for sugar babes!”… the steady increase in and large number of online dating subscribers.”
Rebecca: “How different the tactics of matching individuals on each site were. Going into the project I thought there was one basic way online dating sites went about matching users, but instead there are very different ways of finding matches, depending on the expectations of the user.”
Alanna: “I didn’t think the matching systems, especially the scientific ones, would be so complicated. I was also surprised by the statistics–I didn’t think so many people used online dating. A few years ago it seemed pretty taboo to meet someone online, and now everyone does it.”
Michelle: “The most surprising finding to me wasn’t so much a finding as it was a response from the people at the conference. Many of the people we spoke with had their own stories and opinions about the benefits and success of online dating sites. I was also surprised by the volume of data stored and processed by these sites.”
According to Faculty Advisors Wendy Urban and Claudia Pine-Simon, the concept for the project was intriguing and fascinating, but there was a little concern that it wasn’t technical or scientific enough. “I was concerned that there wasn’t enough substance,” said Wendy. “But the students achieved wonderful things with this project.”
In addition to honing research and analysis skills, the students gained a great deal of self-confidence and learned the value of teamwork. According to Claudia, “All these women have very different interests, but they learned to capitalize on each other’s strengths. Their hard work culminated in a project in which both they and Temple can be proud.”
