John T. Riedl

John Thomas Riedl (1962 to 2013) was an American computer scientist and McKnight Distinguished Professor at the University of Minnesota, described as a founder of the field of recommender systems, social computing and interactive intelligent user interface systems. He spent most of his academic career at the University of Minnesota from 1990 to 2013, after earlier work at Purdue University from 1983 to 1989, and led the GroupLens Research group at Minnesota, focusing on collaborative filtering and recommendation technologies. He co-founded the company Net Perceptions in 1996 to commercialize this research, which had an enormous impact on e-commerce before the company was liquidated in 2004. He advised sixteen PhD students who went on to positions at Google, Intel, eBay and other major technology companies, and he received both ACM and IEEE Fellow designations for his contributions.