“KWARC was!”

Keynote Alexandros Paramythis Lernen, Wissen, Adaptivität (LWA 2008), University of Würzburg, 6.-8. October 2008. Track: ABIS (see slides)

Current focus of Alexandros Paramythis:

• Adaptation on the basis of collaborative user activities
• Meta-Adaptivity
• Evaluation of Adaptivity (see also Stephan Weibelzahl)

Focus of the talk: Is the research community on user modelling and adaptivity still relevant and (if so) in what ways?

Netflix Prize: The competition on improving Netflix’s accuracy of the prediction by 10% gives as insights in the maturity of the community. It was not possible to make the improvement of 10% immediately, indicating some level of maturity. But still the community is not yet mature enough as a 10% improvement is still consider realistic (in contrast to more mature communities such as the database researchers).

Web 2.0 paradigms: Bringing user participation and contribution to Web 2.0 content. The emphasis is on social behaviours/ online ways to connect with people with similar interest. Two aspects: (1) creating social graphs (networks) summarizing relation between people and (2) creating tag clouds to summarize relations between concepts (expressing people’s interest via their tags). Both structures can get unwieldy – so the challenge is to filter and adapt these structures. Researchers are starting on personalization of tag clouds and social networks now.

Are adaptive hypermedia different to adaptive systems? Is this really an important question to ask? Or should we no longer distinguish these two fields?

Some under-explored adaptivity topics are: (1) social dimension of users; (2) collaboration/ cooperation; and (3) user activities.

How does user profile change in Web2.0? Are we (in academia) aware of approaches in industry? There is almost no cooperation between academia and industry although the latter came up with several de facto standards:

• DataPortability initiative: “Data Portability is the option to use your personal data between trusted applications and vendors.”
• OpenSocial (promoted by Google): “OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”
• OpenID: “OpenID is a shared identity service, which allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, single sign-on, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site.”
• APML – Attention Profiling Mark-up Language: “APML allows users to share their own personal Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows the exchange of reading lists between News Readers.”

Adaptivity in Ubiquity: We have to address new adaptive scenarios. Also here industry has contributed already: see e.g. IBMS emotion mouse; see Geotagging

Ubiquity in adaptive eLearning: Computer have turned into tutors almost as good as human instructors. But mist learning takes place outside the classroom. We can not easily observe these learning processes; adaptive system do not support these informal and hidden learning processes.

Security Concerns: Some adaptation algorithms are to weak (see Amazon … case). We can strengthen the algorithms and/or increase the investment required for significant effects to the system’s adaptive behaviour.

Quality: Adaptation quality is an illusive goal as it is hard to define it (harder than e.g. interaction quality). Moreover, the success of adaptation often depends on the application domain and the overall experience of the user. Thus, evaluation adaptation is difficult (see Stephan Weibelzahl). We need to isolate adaptation from the other components to measure its impact without the influence of other aspects of the system (e.g. the user model or user interface).

The adaptation and user modelling community is a rather closed community. Access to publication is limited due to copy rights. Moreover, researchers tend to reinvent the wheel over and over again. Industry is completely ignored although they already widely use their de facto standards like OpenID … We should become aware of this and start to considering existing industrial approaches as well as start collaborations between industry and academia.

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