A number of researches in the Recommender Systems (RSs) domain suggest that the recommendations that are "best" according to objective metrics are sometimes not the ones that are most satisfactory or useful to the users. The paper investigates the quality of RSs from a user-centric perspective. We discuss an empirical study that involved 210 users and considered seven RSs on the same dataset that use different baseline and state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms. We measured the user's perceived quality of each of them, focusing on accuracy and novelty of recommended items, and on overall users' satisfaction. We ranked the considered recommenders with respect to these attributes, and compared these results against measures of statistical quality of the considered algorithms as they have been assessed by past studies in the field using information retrieval and machine learning algorithms.

Several researchers suggest that the Recommendation Systems (RSs) that are the "best" according to statistical metrics might not be the most satisfactory for the user. We explored this issue through an empirical study that involved 210 users and considered 7 RSs using different recommender algorithms on the same dataset. We measured user's perceived quality of each RS, and compared these results against measures of statistical quality of the considered algorithms as they have been assessed by past studies in the field, highlighting some interesting results

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System-theoretical methods are already used for the control of computing systems, but much more can be done exploiting said methods for their ‘design’. This requires to express in control-theoretical terms desires and specifications that originate in the computer science domain, which may not be immediate. It also requires to accept that part of the addressed system be modified, which may pose some acceptance problems. However, if those issues are handled correctly, the payback is often very relevant. This study demonstrates the above ideas in the context of resource allocation

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