Liliana Ardissono

User Modeling and Recommendation Techniques for Personalized Electronic Program Guides

This chapter presents the recommendation techniques applied in Personal Program Guide (PPG). This is a system generating personalized Electronic Program Guides for Digital TV. The PPG manages a user model that stores the estimates of the individual user’s preferences for TV program categories. This model results from the integration of different preference acquisition modules that handle explicit user preferences, stereotypical information about TV viewers, and information about the user’s viewing behavior. The observation of the individual viewing behavior is particularly easy because the PPG runs on the set-top box and is deeply integrated with the TV playing and the video recording services offered by that type of device.

A framework for the development of personalized, distributed web-based configuration systems

For the last two decades, configuration systems relying on AI techniques have successfully been applied in industrial environments. These systems support the configuration of complex products and services in shorter time with fewer errors and, therefore, reduce the costs of a mass-customization business model. The European Union-funded project entitled CUSTOMER-ADAPTIVE WEB INTERFACE FOR THE CONFIGURATION OF PRODUCTS AND SERVICES WITH MULTIPLE SUPPLIERS (CAWICOMS) aims at the next generation of web-based configuration applications that cope with two challenges of todays open, networked economy: (1) the support for heterogeneous user groups in an open-market environment and (2) the integration of configurable subproducts provided by specialized suppliers.This article describes the CAWICOMS WORKBENCH for the development of configuration services, offering personalized user interaction as well as distributed configuration of products and services in a supply chain. The developed tools and techniques rely on a harmonized knowledge representation and knowledge-acquisition mechanism, open XML-based protocols, and advanced personalization and distributed reasoning techniques. We exploited the workbench based on the real-world business scenario of distributed configuration of services in the domain of information processing-based virtual private networks.

Tailoring the interaction with users in electronic shops

We describe the user modeling and personalization techniques adopted in SETA, a shell supporting the construction of adaptive Web stores which customize the interactions with users, suggesting the items best fitting their needs, and adapting the description of the store catalog to their preferences and expertise. SETA uses stereotypical information to handle the user models and applies personalization rules to dynamically generate the hypertextual pages presenting products: the system adapts the graphical aspect, length and terminology used in the descriptions to the user’s receptivity, expertise and interests. Moreover, it maintains a profile associated to each person the goods are selected for, to provide multiple criteria for the selection of items, tailored to the beneficiaries’ preferences.

Enabling conversations with web services

The emerging standards for the publication of Web Services enable the invocation of services having simple interaction protocols, but they fail to support complex e-business interactions, where the peers exchange several messages. In order to extend the classes of services which can be invoked by the consumers, we propose a conversational model supporting the management of complex interactions between clients and Web Services. Our model supports the consumer in the management of a conversation which respects the business logic of the service without imposing the explicit management of the conversational context.

Personalization in e-commerce applications

This chapter is about personalization and adaptation in electronic commerce (e-commerce) applications. In the first part, we briefly introduce the challenges posed by e-commerce and we discuss how personalization strategies can help companies to face such challenges. Then, we describe the aspects of personalization, taken as a general technique for the customization of services to the user, which have been successfully employed in e-commerce Web sites. To conclude, we present some emerging trends and and we discuss future perspectives.

Personalization in business-to-customer interaction

• Product features specify different types of information such as general data (price), aesthetic information (size, color), and technical information (functionalities, requirements). This characterization is exploited to customize the product presentations, according to the user’s interests. • More or less technically detailed descriptions are generated to suit the user’s knowledge. • The amount of information presented is tailored to the user’s interests and receptivity, showing only the most relevant data and hiding other details that the user can reach on demand as supplementary information.

Enhancing Web services with diagnostic capabilities

Fault management in Web services composed by individual services from multiple suppliers currently relies on a local analysis that does not span across individual services, thus limiting the effectiveness of recovery strategies. We propose to address this limitation of current standards for Web service composition by employing model-based diagnosis to enhance fault analysis. We propose to add diagnostic Web services to the set of Web services providing the overall service, acting as supervisors of their execution, by identifying anomalies and explaining them in terms of faults to be repaired. This approach poses the basis for the development of specialized recovery and compensation techniques aimed at addressing different problems, which could not be otherwise discriminated.

A multi-agent infrastructure for developing personalized web-based systems

Although personalization and ubiquity are key properties for on-line services, they challenge the development of these systems due to the complexity of the required architectures. In particular, the current infrastructures for the development of personalized, ubiquitous services are not flexible enough to accommodate the configuration requirements of the various application domains. To address such issues, highly configurable infrastructures are needed.In this article, we describe Seta2000, an infrastructure for the development of recommender systems that support personalized interactions with their users and are accessible from different types of devices (e.g., desktop computers and mobile phones). The Seta2000 infrastructure offers a built-in recommendation engine, based on a multi-agent architecture. Moreover, the infrastructure supports the integration of heterogeneous software and the development of agents that can be configured to offer specialized facilities within a recommender system, but also to dynamically enable and disable such facilities, depending on the requirements of the application domain. The Seta2000 infrastructure has been exploited to develop two prototypes: SeTA is an adaptive Web store personalizing the recommendation and presentation of products in the Web. INTRIGUE is a personalized, ubiquitous information system suggesting attractions to possibly heterogeneous tourist groups.

A Conversational Approach to the Interaction With Web Services

The emerging standards for the specification of Web Services support the publication of the static interfaces of the operations they may execute. However, little attention is paid to the management of long‐lasting interactions between the service providers and their consumers. Although this is not an issue in the case of “one‐shot” services, it challenges the provision of services requiring the exchange of multiple messages between the business partners. In this article, we present a conversational model supporting the management of long‐lasting interactions where several messages have to be exchanged before the service is completed. Our model aims at facilitating the consumers during the service invocation because in this way the establishment of short‐term business relations can be simplified. To this extent, we provide a computational framework that can be exploited to manage a conversation between the consumer and the service provider. Our framework is inspired from the research developed in Computational Linguistics and in the area of Multi‐Agent Systems to manage human‐to‐computer and agent‐to‐agent dialog. However, we employ techniques suitable to comply with the emerging Web Service standards and with the scalability requirements of the Internet.

A configurable system for the construction of adaptive virtual stores

With the recent expansion of the Internet, the interest towards electronic sales has quickly grown and many tools have been built to help vendors to set up their Web stores. These tools offer all the facilities for building the store databases and managing the order processing and secure payment transactions, but they typically do not focus on issues like the personalization of the interaction with the customers. However, Web surfers are generally heterogeneous and have different needs and preferences; moreover, the trend of marketing strategies is to pay more and more attention to the specific buyers. So, the importance of personalizing the interaction with the user and the product presentation is increasing. In this paper, we describe the architecture of a configurable virtual Web store supporting personalized hypertextual interactions with users. Our system builds a user profile by applying user modeling techniques and stereotypical information about the characteristics of customer groups; this profile is used during the interaction in order to tailor the product descriptions and the selection of items to recommend to the users needs, varying the layout of the hypertextual pages and the detail of the descriptions accordingly. Tailoring the systems behavior requires the parallel execution of several complex tasks during the interaction (e.g., identifying the users preferences, selecting the products most suited to her, dynamically generating the hypertextual pages). Therefore, we have defined a multiagent architecture where these tasks are executed by different agents, which cooperate offering specific services to each other. In our system, the domain‐dependent knowledge, concerning information about products and customer features, is declaratively represented and clearly separated from the domain‐independent components, which represent the core of the virtual store. This separation has the advantage that our architecture can be easily instantiated on several sales domains, therefore obtaining different Web stores out of a single shell. Our system is developed in a Java‐based environment and the overall architecture includes the prototype of a virtual store and the configuration tools which can be used to set up a new store on a specific sales domain.