Bob Kummerfeld

Personis: A Server for User Models

A core element of an adaptive hypertext systems is the user model. This paper describes Personis, a user model server. We describe the architecture, design and implementation. We also describe the way that it is intended to operate in conjunction with the rest of an adaptive hypertext system.A distinctive aspect of the Personis user model server follows from our concern for making adaptive systems scrutable: these enable users to see the details of the information held about them, the processes used to gather it and the way that it is used to personalise an adaptive hypertext. We describe how the architecture supports this.The paper describes our evaluations of the current server. These indicate that the approach and implementation provide a workable server for small to medium sized user collections of information needed to adapt the hypertext.

MOOCs: So Many Learners, So Much Potential ...

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have exploded onto the scene, promising to satisfy a worldwide thirst for a high-quality, personalized, and free education. This article explores where MOOCs fit within the e-learning and Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) landscape.

PersonisAD: distributed, active, scrutable model framework for context-aware services

PersonisAD, is a framework for building context-aware, ubiquitous applications: its defining foundation is a consistent mechanism for scrutable modelling of people, sensors, devices and places. This paper describes the PersonisAD features for supporting distributed models with active elements which can trigger when relevant events occur. This framework makes it possible to quickly create new context-aware applications. We demonstrate the power of the framework by describing how it has been used to create two context aware applications: MusicMix which plays music based on the preferences of the people in the room; MyPlace, which informs people of relevant details of the current environment. Major contributions of this work are: the PersonisAD framework which provides a powerful and consistent means to respond to significant changes in the models of people, sensors, devices and places; support for distributed models and associated resource discovery; two applications that illustrate the power of PersonisAD.

Consistent Modelling of Users, Devices and Sensors in a Ubiquitous Computing Environment

This paper describes the use of an accretion-resolution user modelling representation to model people, places and objects. We explain the motivation for the key properties of the representation, especially those of particular importance for ubiquitous computing: firstly, for flexibility in interpreting the typically noisy and potentially conflicting evidence about users’ locations; secondly, to support users in scrutinising their user model, the processes that determine its contents and the way that it is used in the ubiquitous computing environment.A novel and important aspect of this work is our extension of the representation beyond modelling just users, using it also to represent the other elements such as devices, sensors, rooms and buildings. We illustrate our approach in terms of models we have been building for a system which enables users to gain personalised information about the sensors and services in a ubiquitous computing environment. We report experiments on the scalability and the management of inconsistency in modelling of location, based on accretion-resolution

Creating personalized systems that people can scrutinize and control: Drivers, principles and experience

Widespread personalized computing systems play an already important and fast-growing role in diverse contexts, such as location-based services, recommenders, commercial Web-based services, and teaching systems. The personalization in these systems is driven by information about the user, a user model. Moreover, as computers become both ubiquitous and pervasive, personalization operates across the many devices and information stores that constitute the users personal digital ecosystem. This enables personalization, and the user models driving it, to play an increasing role in peoples everyday lives. This makes it critical to establish ways to address key problems of personalization related to privacy, invisibility of personalization, errors in user models, wasted user models, and the broad issue of enabling people to control their user models and associated personalization. We offer scrutable user models as a foundation for tackling these problems. This article argues the importance of scrutable user modeling and personalization, illustrating key elements in case studies from our work. We then identify the broad roles for scrutable user models. The article describes how to tackle the technical and interface challenges of designing and building scrutable user modeling systems, presenting design principles and showing how they were established over our twenty years of work on the Personis software framework. Our contributions are the set of principles for scrutable personalization linked to our experience from creating and evaluating frameworks and associated applications built upon them. These constitute a general approach to tackling problems of personalization by enabling users to scrutinize their user models as a basis for understanding and controlling personalization.

Firestorm: a brainstorming application for collaborative group work at tabletops

The tabletop computer interface has the potential to support idea generation by a group using the brainstorming technique. This paper describes the design and implementation of a table-top brainstorming system. To gain insights into its effectiveness, we conducted a user study which compared our system against a more conventional approach. We analysed the processes and results with the goal of gaining an understanding of the ways a tabletop brainstorming system can support the phases of this activity. We found that our tabletop interface facilitated the creation of more ideas and participants tended to create more categories. We observed that the tabletop provides a useful record of the group processes and this is valuable for reviewing how well a group followed recommended brainstorming processes. Our contributions are a new table-top brainstorming system and insights into the nature of the benefits a tabletop affords for brainstorming and for capturing the processes employed by a group.

User Models for Customized Hypertext

PT, the personalised text system enables authors to create hypertext customised to match the individual users preferences, interests, current goals, background and other attributes. This chapter describes the motivation for such a system in terms of its use in tutoring systems that generate a hypertext layout dynamically, based on a user model. The customisation is driven by two essential elements: a meta-hypertext which is an augmented-html document and a user model that tracks relevant information about the user. This chapter describes the ways that we have constructed these elements and explains how this has been driven by a commitment to user control. We also describe some fundamental elements of the design and implementation of such a system. One of the challenges of managing PTs meta-hypertext documents derives from the increased complexity of authors task. We describe our approach to this problem.

Challenges and Solutions of Ubiquitous User Modeling

Ubiquitous display environments are public places with various situated public displays. These displays are intended to provide relevant information to people in their vicinity, where this may include the regular inhabitants of the space as well as visitors. For this latter group, it is particularly challenging to provide relevant information. This is because personalization relies on the availability of information about the individual (or group). Ubiquitous user modeling research tries to address this challenge. This chapter provides a brief introduction to user modeling and user modeling techniques and then elaborates on ubiquitous user modeling, its challenges, and the state-of-the-art research. It aims to provide a broad introduction to key approaches to user modeling and personalization as a starting point for the reader who wants to appreciate the challenges of personalization for ubiquitous display environments.

PersonisJ: mobile, client-side user modelling

The increasing trend towards powerful mobile phones opens many possibilities for valuable personalised services to be available on the phone Client-side personalisation for these services has important benefits when connectivity to the cloud is restricted or unavailable The user may also find it desirable when they prefer that their user model be kept only on their phone and under their own control, rather than under the control of the cloud-based service provider This paper describes PersonisJ, a user modelling framework that can support client-side personalisation on the Android phone platform We discuss the particular challenges in creating a user modelling framework for this platform We have evaluated PersonisJ at two levels: we have created a demonstrator application that delivers a personalised museum tour based on client-side personalisation; we also report on evaluations of its scalability Contributions of this paper are the description of the architecture, the implementation, and the evaluation of a user modelling framework for client-side personalisation on mobile phones.

A new dynamic architecture for an active network

Existing active network architectures depend on using statically typed languages for protection and performance. Unfortunately, this limits some of the more dynamic features of an active network. In this paper, we present PANTS (Python Active Node Transfer System)-a dynamically extensible active network architecture. We describe a new architecture for an active node which does not depend on language-based security but provides the flexibility to perform dynamic changes to the node and to the capsules. An implementation conforming to this architecture is described and compared with existing active network architectures.