Adaptive Rich Media Presentations via Preference-Based Constrained Optimization

Personalization and adaptation of multi-media messages are well known and well studied problems. Ideally, each message should reflect its recipient\u27s interests, device capabilities, and network conditions. Such personalization is more difficult to carry out given a compound multi-media presentation containing multiple spatially and temporally related elements. This paper describes a novel formal, yet practical approach, and an implemented system prototype for authoring and adapting compound multi-media presentations. Our approach builds on recent advances in preference specification and preferences-based constrained optimization techniques

04271 Abstracts Collection -- Preferences: Specification, Inference, Applications

From 27.06.04 to 02.07.04, the Dagstuhl Seminar 04271 ``Preferences: Specification, Inference, Applications\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Harmful Freedom of Choice: Lessons from the Cellphone Market

This article focuses on the relationship between provider and customer, specifically on the complexity of available contracts in the cellphone market and the ways this complexity might be harmful to consumers. This article aims to elucidate the issues, fleshing them out both as a general phenomenon and as a specific implementation in the cellphone context. The aim is not to provide ultimate solutions, but to show the directions these solutions might take and the difficulties involved

ECONOMIC MODELING OF FARM PRODUCTION AND CONSERVATION DECISIONS IN RESPONSE TO ALTERNATIVE RESOURCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES

Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management,

On Graphical Modeling of Preference and Importance

In recent years, CP-nets have emerged as a useful tool for supporting preference elicitation, reasoning, and representation. CP-nets capture and support reasoning with qualitative conditional preference statements, statements that are relatively natural for users to express. In this paper, we extend the CP-nets formalism to handle another class of very natural qualitative statements one often uses in expressing preferences in daily life - statements of relative importance of attributes. The resulting formalism, TCP-nets, maintains the spirit of CP-nets, in that it remains focused on using only simple and natural preference statements, uses the ceteris paribus semantics, and utilizes a graphical representation of this information to reason about its consistency and to perform, possibly constrained, optimization using it. The extra expressiveness it provides allows us to better model tradeoffs users would like to make, more faithfully representing their preferences

Multimedia delivery in the future internet

The term “Networked Media” implies that all kinds of media including text, image, 3D graphics, audio and video are produced, distributed, shared, managed and consumed on-line through various networks, like the Internet, Fiber, WiFi, WiMAX, GPRS, 3G and so on, in a convergent manner [1]. This white paper is the contribution of the Media Delivery Platform (MDP) cluster and aims to cover the Networked challenges of the Networked Media in the transition to the Future of the Internet. Internet has evolved and changed the way we work and live. End users of the Internet have been confronted with a bewildering range of media, services and applications and of technological innovations concerning media formats, wireless networks, terminal types and capabilities. And there is little evidence that the pace of this innovation is slowing. Today, over one billion of users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi)media file and over 47 millions of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 Exabytes1 of content. In the near future these numbers are expected to exponentially rise. It is expected that the Internet content will be increased by at least a factor of 6, rising to more than 990 Exabytes before 2012, fuelled mainly by the users themselves. Moreover, it is envisaged that in a near- to mid-term future, the Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens’ quality of life, working conditions, edutainment and safety. In this evolving environment, new transport protocols, new multimedia encoding schemes, cross-layer inthe network adaptation, machine-to-machine communication (including RFIDs), rich 3D content as well as community networks and the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) overlays are expected to generate new models of interaction and cooperation, and be able to support enhanced perceived quality-of-experience (PQoE) and innovative applications “on the move”, like virtual collaboration environments, personalised services/ media, virtual sport groups, on-line gaming, edutainment. In this context, the interaction with content combined with interactive/multimedia search capabilities across distributed repositories, opportunistic P2P networks and the dynamic adaptation to the characteristics of diverse mobile terminals are expected to contribute towards such a vision. Based on work that has taken place in a number of EC co-funded projects, in Framework Program 6 (FP6) and Framework Program 7 (FP7), a group of experts and technology visionaries have voluntarily contributed in this white paper aiming to describe the status, the state-of-the art, the challenges and the way ahead in the area of Content Aware media delivery platforms

Automatically Generating Personalized User Interfaces with SUPPLE

Today's computer–human interfaces are typically designed with the assumption that they are going to be used by an able-bodied person, who is using a typical set of input and output devices, who has typical perceptual and cognitive abilities, and who is sitting in a stable, warm environment. Any deviation from these assumptions may drastically hamper the person's effectiveness—not because of any inherent barrier to interaction, but because of a mismatch between the person's effective abilities and the assumptions underlying the interface design. We argue that automatic personalized interface generation is a feasible and scalable solution to this challenge. We present our Supple system, which can automatically generate interfaces adapted to a person's devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities. In this paper we formally define interface generation as an optimization problem and demonstrate that, despite a large solution space (of up to 1017 possible interfaces), the problem is computationally feasible. In fact, for a particular class of cost functions, Supple produces exact solutions in under a second for most cases, and in a little over a minute in the worst case encountered, thus enabling run-time generation of user interfaces. We further show how several different design criteria can be expressed in the cost function, enabling different kinds of personalization. We also demonstrate how this approach enables extensive user- and system-initiated run-time adaptations to the interfaces after they have been generated. Supple is not intended to replace human user interface designers—instead, it offers alternative user interfaces for those people whose devices, tasks, preferences, and abilities are not sufficiently addressed by the hand-crafted designs. Indeed, the results of our study show that, compared to manufacturers' defaults, interfaces automatically generated by Supple significantly improve speed, accuracy and satisfaction of people with motor impairments.Engineering and Applied Science

Adaptive Layout for Interactive Documents

This thesis presents a novel approach to create automated layouts for rich illustrative material that could adapt according to the screen size and contextual requirements. The adaption not only considers global layout but also deals with the content and layout adaptation of individual illustrations in the layout. An unique solution has been developed that integrates constraint-based and force-directed techniques to create adaptive grid-based and non-grid layouts. A set of annotation layouts are developed which adapt the annotated illustrations to match the contextual requirements over time

CP-nets: A Tool for Representing and Reasoning withConditional Ceteris Paribus Preference Statements

Information about user preferences plays a key role in automated decision making. In many domains it is desirable to assess such preferences in a qualitative rather than quantitative way. In this paper, we propose a qualitative graphical representation of preferences that reflects conditional dependence and independence of preference statements under a ceteris paribus (all else being equal) interpretation. Such a representation is often compact and arguably quite natural in many circumstances. We provide a formal semantics for this model, and describe how the structure of the network can be exploited in several inference tasks, such as determining whether one outcome dominates (is preferred to) another, ordering a set outcomes according to the preference relation, and constructing the best outcome subject to available evidence

Dagstuhl News January - December 2008

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic