Yoshiyuki Koseki

Unintrusive customization techniques for Web advertising

Most online advertisement systems in place today use the concept of consumer targeting: each user is identified and, according to his or her system setup, browsing habits and available off-line information, categorized in order to customize the advertisements for highest user responsiveness. This constant monitoring of a users online habits, together with the trend to centralize this data and link it with other databases, continuously nurtures fears about the growing lack of privacy in a networked society. In this paper, we propose a novel technique of adapting online advertisement to a users short term interests in a non-intrusive way. As a proof-of-concept we implemented a dynamic advertisement selection system able to deliver customized advertisements to users of an online search service or Web directory. No user-specific data elements are collected or stored at any time. Initial experiments indicate that the system is able to improve the average click-through rate substantially compared to random selection methods.

Internet scrapbook: automating Web browsing tasks by demonstration

This paper describes a programming-by-demonstration system, called Internet Scrapbook, which allows users with little programming skill to automate repetitive browsing tasks. With the system, the user can create a personal page by clipping only the necessary portions from multiple Web pages. Once the personal page is created, the system updates it on behalf of the user by extracting the specified parts from the latest Web pages. The data extraction method in Scrapbook is based on the regularity in modifications of Web pages, i.e. that headings and positions of articles are rarely changed even though the articles themselves are modified. In the experiments to examine the accuracy of the data extraction algorithm, 96 percent of user-specified portions were correctly extracted.

ANATAGONOMY: a personalized newspaper on the World Wide Web

Abstract This paper describes a personalized newspaper on the World Wide Web (WWW), called ANATAGONOMY. The main feature of this system is that the newspaper is personalized without asking the users to specify their preferences explicitly. The system monitors user operations on the articles and reflects them in the user profiles. Differently from conventional newspapers on the WWW, our system sends an interaction agent implemented as a Java applet to the client side, and the agent monitors the user operations and creates each users newspaper pages automatically. The server side manages user profiles and anticipates how interesting an article would be for each user. The interaction agent on the client side manages all the user interactions, including the automatic layout of pages. Our system has page multiple layout algorithms and the user can switch from one view to another anytime, according to the preference or machine environment. On one of the views, the user can even see all the articles sequentially without performing any operations. We evaluated a scheme in which the user scores each article explicitly, and a scheme in which all the personalization is done automatically. The results show that automatic personalization works well when some parameters are set properly.

A user interface using fingerprint recognition: holding commands and data objects on fingers

This paper describes a new user interface, called a fingerprint user interface (FUI), which employs fingerprint recognition. While the unique feature patterns of fingerprints have mainly been used for personal identification, the FUI is unique in that it uses not only the differences among fingerprint patterns of different persons, but also the differences among the ten fingers of a single person. In the FUI, the system identifies the finger that has operated (touched) an input device through pattern matching of fingerprints and it performs the task assigned to the identified finger. Since users are able to specify different tasks by using different fingers, they feel as if commands and data objects were actually held on their fingers.

TimeSlider: an interface to specify time point

This paper introduces TimeSlider, a user interface technique that allows the user to specify time points. TimeSlider is a kind of slider whose time scale is nonlinear and which moves as a user operation. The nonlinearly enables it to display a long time range in a small space, and the movement as a user operation helps the user to specify time points quickly. An example application, in which TimeSlider enabled the user to restore past WWW pages, demonstrated the effectiveness of our technique.

Effective personalization of push-type systems—visualizing information freshness

Abstract This paper discusses an effective personalization method, especially on push-type systems. Many conventional personalization systems rely strictly on personal interests during information presentation, but the “freshness” of information is often as important as the relation to personal preferences. For example, a user who accesses a WWW newspaper several times a day, expects to see fresh articles displayed in prominent positions rather than “hidden” among articles that may be more relevant but that have already been read. This paper therefore presents a novel personalization method incorporating “information freshness” and that is extremely useful for the ever-growing number of push-type systems. Information freshness is indicated by using a perspective representation which shows virtual depth on the screen: fresh articles seem “closer” to the user, while old articles seem farther away. This representation allows us to simultaneously display both the personal relevance and the freshness of the information. We have successfully implemented two applications using this technique: a personalized newspaper service and an easy-to-use scrapbook for Web pages.

Internet scrapbook: creating personalized world wide web pages

This paper describes an information personalization system, called Internet Scrapbook, which enables users to create a personal page by clipping and merging their necessary data gathered from multiple Web pages. Even when the source Web pages are modified, the system updates the personal page, replacing with the latest data extracted from the source pages. Therefore, once a user creates their personal pages, she can browse her necessary information only.

Internet scrapbook: automating Web browsing tasks by programming-by-demonstration

This paper describes an intelligent Web browsing system, called Internet Scrapbook, which allows users with little programming skill to automate their repetitive browsing tasks using a programming-by-demonstration technique. With the system, the user can create a personal page by clipping only the necessary portions from multiple Web pages. Once the personal page is created, the system updates it on behalf of the user by extracting the specified parts from the latest Web pages.

Integration of multiple knowledge representation for classification problems

This paper describes an approach to integrating various knowledge representations for classification problems. Knowledge representation forms have been analysed. The analysis shows that representation suitability depends on a given situation. Therefore, multiple representation form capability and form conversion capability are both necessary to support developing knowledge bases for wide application areas. A classification problem tool, called HOLON/VP(DT), has been developed with the aim of providing experts with the integrated knowledge representation capability. A knowledge base can be represented in a tabular form, a rule form and a tree form. Form conversion can be accomplished at all times. With this integrated representation, an expert is able to build a knowledge base using the most appropriate form.

A domain cluster interface for WWW search

Because of the recent explosive increase in the number of WWW documents, directory services are becoming indispensable. In the keyword search function of most directory services, search results are displayed as a URL list ordered by importance as calculated by the system, but the order sometimes does not have any meaning to the user since the calculation algorithm is a black box. In addition, it is difficult to find useful documents from a long list. To solve this problem, the authors have developed a new WWW search system that clusters the documents in the search results by organization name, derived from its URL domain name. The system displays the clusters in a hierarchical tree view form.