Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

Affective feedback: an investigation into the role of emotions in the information seeking process

User feedback is considered to be a critical element in the information seeking process, especially in relation to relevance assessment. Current feedback techniques determine content relevance with respect to the cognitive and situational levels of interaction that occurs between the user and the retrieval system. However, apart from real-life problems and information objects, users interact with intentions, motivations and feelings, which can be seen as critical aspects of cognition and decision-making. The study presented in this paper serves as a starting point to the exploration of the role of emotions in the information seeking process. Results show that the latter not only interweave with different physiological, psychological and cognitive processes, but also form distinctive patterns, according to specific task, and according to specific user

Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

IceBreaker: Solving Cold Start Problem for Video Recommendation Engines

Internet has brought about a tremendous increase in content of all forms and, in that, video content constitutes the major backbone of the total content being published as well as watched. Thus it becomes imperative for video recommendation engines such as Hulu to look for novel and innovative ways to recommend the newly added videos to their users. However, the problem with new videos is that they lack any sort of metadata and user interaction so as to be able to rate the videos for the consumers. To this effect, this paper introduces the several techniques we develop for the Content Based Video Relevance Prediction (CBVRP) Challenge being hosted by Hulu for the ACM Multimedia Conference 2018. We employ different architectures on the CBVRP dataset to make use of the provided frame and video level features and generate predictions of videos that are similar to the other videos. We also implement several ensemble strategies to explore complementarity between both the types of provided features. The obtained results are encouraging and will impel the boundaries of research for multimedia based video recommendation systems

Analysing user physiological responses for affective video summarisation

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Displays. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2009 Elsevier B.V.Video summarisation techniques aim to abstract the most significant content from a video stream. This is typically achieved by processing low-level image, audio and text features which are still quite disparate from the high-level semantics that end users identify with (the ‘semantic gap’). Physiological responses are potentially rich indicators of memorable or emotionally engaging video content for a given user. Consequently, we investigate whether they may serve as a suitable basis for a video summarisation technique by analysing a range of user physiological response measures, specifically electro-dermal response (EDR), respiration amplitude (RA), respiration rate (RR), blood volume pulse (BVP) and heart rate (HR), in response to a range of video content in a variety of genres including horror, comedy, drama, sci-fi and action. We present an analysis framework for processing the user responses to specific sub-segments within a video stream based on percent rank value normalisation. The application of the analysis framework reveals that users respond significantly to the most entertaining video sub-segments in a range of content domains. Specifically, horror content seems to elicit significant EDR, RA, RR and BVP responses, and comedy content elicits comparatively lower levels of EDR, but does seem to elicit significant RA, RR, BVP and HR responses. Drama content seems to elicit less significant physiological responses in general, and both sci-fi and action content seem to elicit significant EDR responses. We discuss the implications this may have for future affective video summarisation approaches

"You Tube and I Find" - personalizing multimedia content access

Recent growth in broadband access and proliferation of small personal devices that capture images and videos has led to explosive growth of multimedia content available everywhereVfrom personal disks to the Web. While digital media capture and upload has become nearly universal with newer device technology, there is still a need for better tools and technologies to search large collections of multimedia data and to find and deliver the right content to a user according to her current needs and preferences. A renewed focus on the subjective dimension in the multimedia lifecycle, fromcreation, distribution, to delivery and consumption, is required to address this need beyond what is feasible today. Integration of the subjective aspects of the media itselfVits affective, perceptual, and physiological potential (both intended and achieved), together with those of the users themselves will allow for personalizing the content access, beyond today’s facility. This integration, transforming the traditional multimedia information retrieval (MIR) indexes to more effectively answer specific user needs, will allow a richer degree of personalization predicated on user intention and mode of interaction, relationship to the producer, content of the media, and their history and lifestyle. In this paper, we identify the challenges in achieving this integration, current approaches to interpreting content creation processes, to user modelling and profiling, and to personalized content selection, and we detail future directions. The structure of the paper is as follows: In Section I, we introduce the problem and present some definitions. In Section II, we present a review of the aspects of personalized content and current approaches for the same. Section III discusses the problem of obtaining metadata that is required for personalized media creation and present eMediate as a case study of an integrated media capture environment. Section IV presents the MAGIC system as a case study of capturing effective descriptive data and putting users first in distributed learning delivery. The aspects of modelling the user are presented as a case study in using user’s personality as a way to personalize summaries in Section V. Finally, Section VI concludes the paper with a discussion on the emerging challenges and the open problems

User evaluation outside the lab: the trial of Físchlár-News

A user study of Físchlár-News system was conducted in Spring 2004 with 16 users, each user using the system for a 1-month period. Físchlár-News is an experimental online news archive that incorporates various automatic content-based video indexing techniques and a news story recommender algorithm to process and index the daily 9 o’clock broadcast news from TV and allows its users to browse, search, be recommended, and play news stories on a conventional web browser. Pre and post-trial questionnaires, interaction logging and incident diary methods collected both qualitative and quantitative usage data during the trial period. While the details of the findings from this evaluation is reported elsewhere, in this paper we report the details of the methodology taken and our experience of conducting this evaluation

Social and content hybrid image recommender system for mobile social networks

One of the advantages of social networks is the possibility to socialize and personalize the content created or shared by the users. In mobile social networks, where the devices have limited capabilities in terms of screen size and computing power, Multimedia Recommender Systems help to present the most relevant content to the users, depending on their tastes, relationships and profile. Previous recommender systems are not able to cope with the uncertainty of automated tagging and are knowledge domain dependant. In addition, the instantiation of a recommender in this domain should cope with problems arising from the collaborative filtering inherent nature (cold start, banana problem, large number of users to run, etc.). The solution presented in this paper addresses the abovementioned problems by proposing a hybrid image recommender system, which combines collaborative filtering (social techniques) with content-based techniques, leaving the user the liberty to give these processes a personal weight. It takes into account aesthetics and the formal characteristics of the images to overcome the problems of current techniques, improving the performance of existing systems to create a mobile social networks recommender with a high degree of adaptation to any kind of user

Psychological elements explaining the consumer's adoption and use of a website recommendation system: A theoretical framework proposal

The purpose of this paper is to understand, with an emphasis on the psychological perspective of the research problem, the consumer's adoption and use of a certain web site recommendation system as well as the main psychological outcomes involved. The approach takes the form of theoretical modelling. Findings: A conceptual model is proposed and discussed. A total of 20 research propositions are theoretically analyzed and justified. Research limitations/implications: The theoretical discussion developed here is not empirically validated. This represents an opportunity for future research. Practical implications: The ideas extracted from the discussion of the conceptual model should be a help for recommendation systems designers and web site managers, so that they may be more aware, when working with such systems, of the psychological process consumers undergo when interacting with them. In this regard, numerous practical reflections and suggestions are presented