Explanations of Recommendations

This thesis focuses on explanations of recommendations. Explanations can have many advantages, from inspiring user trust to helping users make good decisions. We have identified seven different aims of explanations, and in this thesis we will consider how explanations can be optimized for some of these aims. We will consider both an explanation's content and its presentation. As a domain, we are currently investigating explanations for a movie recommender, and developing a prototype system. This paper summarizes the goals of the thesis, the methodology we are using, the work done so far and our intended future work.