CHORUS Deliverable 4.4: Report of the 2nd CHORUS Conference

The Second CHORUS Conference and third Yahoo! Research Workshop on the Future of Web Search was held during April 4-5, 2008, in Granvalira, Andorra to discuss future directions in multi-medial information access and other specialised topics in the near future of retrieval. Attendance was at capacity, with 97 participants from 11 countries and 3 continents

On User Modelling for Personalised News Video Recommendation

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for modelling user interests. Our approach captures users evolving information needs, identifies aspects of their need and recommends relevant news items to the users. We introduce our approach within the context of personalised news video retrieval. A news video data set is used for experimentation. We employ a simulated user evaluation

An architecture for life-long user modelling

In this paper, we propose a united architecture for the creation of life-long user profiles. Our architecture combines different steps required for a user prole, including feature extraction and representation, reasoning, recommendation and presentation. We discuss various issues that arise in the context of life-long profiling

Semantic user profiling techniques for personalised multimedia recommendation

Due to the explosion of news materials available through broadcast and other channels, there is an increasing need for personalised news video retrieval. In this work, we introduce a semantic-based user modelling technique to capture users’ evolving information needs. Our approach exploits implicit user interaction to capture long-term user interests in a profile. The organised interests are used to retrieve and recommend news stories to the users. In this paper, we exploit the Linked Open Data Cloud to identify similar news stories that match the users’ interest. We evaluate various recommendation parameters by introducing a simulation-based evaluation scheme

On content-based recommendation and user privacy in social-tagging systems

Recommendation systems and content filtering approaches based on annotations and ratings, essentially rely on users expressing their preferences and interests through their actions, in order to provide personalised content. This activity, in which users engage collectively has been named social tagging, and it is one of the most popular in which users engage online, and although it has opened new possibilities for application interoperability on the semantic web, it is also posing new privacy threats. It, in fact, consists of describing online or offline resources by using free-text labels (i.e. tags), therefore exposing the user profile and activity to privacy attacks. Users, as a result, may wish to adopt a privacy-enhancing strategy in order not to reveal their interests completely. Tag forgery is a privacy enhancing technology consisting of generating tags for categories or resources that do not reflect the user's actual preferences. By modifying their profile, tag forgery may have a negative impact on the quality of the recommendation system, thus protecting user privacy to a certain extent but at the expenses of utility loss. The impact of tag forgery on content-based recommendation is, therefore, investigated in a real-world application scenario where different forgery strategies are evaluated, and the consequent loss in utility is measured and compared.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Customer empowerment in tourism through Consumer Centric Marketing (CCM)

We explain Consumer Centric Marketing (CCM) and adopt this new technique to travel context. Benefits and disadvantages of the CCM are outlined together with warnings of typical caveats Value: CCM will be expected as the norm in the travel industry by customers of the future, yet it is only the innovators who gain real tangible benefits from this development. We outline current and future opportunities to truly place your customer at the centre and provide the organisation with some real savings/gains through the use of ICT Practical Implications: We offer tangible examples for travel industry on how to utilise this new technology. The technology is already available and the ICT companies are keen to establish ways how consumers can utilise it, i.e. by providing ‘content’ for these ICT products the travel industry can fully gain from these developments and also enhance consumers’ gains from it. This can result in more satisfied customers for the travel (as well as ICT) companies thus truly adopting the basic philosophy of marketin