Looking for love in cyberspace

Tired of paying for dating services? You may be in luck -- two Engineering students have set up a free on-line alternative just in time for Valentine's Day. Beginning tomorrow, Penn students can fill out an Internet survey to find their ideal mate on a World Wide Web site designed by Engineering seniors Chris Hyzer and Shai Shen-Orr. The service is "free, and available to anyone with a computer," explained Hyzer, a Computer Science and Electrical Engineering major. Located on-line at the Web site http://www.seas.upenn.edu/valentine, the service is "totally anonymous," which Hyzer noted as one of its benefits. "This could be a really fun service for [students] to use just because you know people can't get your information." Upon entering the site, students are asked to enter a user name and a password of their choice. The student must also provide an e-mail address, which is kept confidential. Students then fill out a survey which will be used to match them with the man or woman of their dreams. Hyzer, who thought up the questions and answers with friends, said, "the questions are really geared to university students." Describing it as "a really funny survey," Hyzer said it would be interesting even for people who weren't looking to find a date. After finishing the survey, students then are given the log-in names of their best matches. These are computed by the program, which "uses pretty high-level artificial intelligence to pick the matches," Hyzer said. Finally, students have the option of sending an e-mail to their prospective partners by typing the message in a provided space and clicking on the log-in name of the match of their choice. The e-mail is sent without either the sender or recipient seeing the e-mail addresses, keeping the service completely anonymous. "If students find a date or wish to remove themselves from the database for any other reason, it is very easy to do so," Hyzer noted. The service was created as Hyzer and Shen-Orr's project for two of their Computer and Information Science courses last semester. "We had to implement a large-scale database," Hyzer explained. "We didn't want to do something that our professors would look at, grade and put in a file somewhere.? We wanted to be practical." Aided by their teaching assistant, Arnaud Sahuguet, a doctorate student in Computer Science, the two continued to work on the service even after their classes ended so the program would be ready for Valentine's Day. Hyzer emphasized that the service is non-profit, unlike other dating services, which, he said, "charge [money] or are for a given [geographical] area or for a certain type of person." "We're not doing it for the money," he said. "We're hoping that people might get some enjoyment out of it." Although they are also advertising through friends and listserves, the service's creators are hoping that the service "will advertise itself? once people go in and look at it and talk about it," Hyzer noted. "For the next few weeks, Penn students can benefit from our efforts by having fun and possibly meeting new people," Hyzer added.