PHAROS – Personalizing Users ’ Experience in Audio-Visual Online Spaces

The large volume of user generated content, although sometimes amateurish, represents a valuable source of information for audiovisual service providers. For example, companies and organizations can efficiently get feedback from consumers observing their online interaction with social media providers. Offering accurately personalized services is possible now, since users provide more personal information about themselves openly, which was previously much more difficult to perceive and measure. In PHAROS, we aim at exploiting the new and freely available data to improve users ’ online experience with respect to their interaction with new media. We focus on building technologies, which bridge the gap between the availability of information (both in form of descriptions of content, such as annotations, and user interests and preferences) and the use of it, for augmenting traditional search and retrieval methods or for personalization purposes. In this paper, we describe how this external information can be brought into PHAROS and how it is used to support users, also describing the multiple components supporting this process. 1