12,948 research outputs found
Discovery Is Never By Chance: Designing for (Un)Serendipity
Serendipity has a long tradition in the history of science as having played a key role in many significant discoveries. Computer scientists, valuing the role of serendipity in discovery, have attempted to design systems that encourage serendipity. However, that research has focused primarily on only one aspect of serendipity: that of chance encounters. In reality, for serendipity to be valuable chance encounters must be synthesized into insight. In this paper we show, through a formal consideration of serendipity and analysis of how various systems have seized on attributes of interpreting serendipity, that there is a richer space for design to support serendipitous creativity, innovation and discovery than has been tapped to date. We discuss how ideas might be encoded to be shared or discovered by ‘association-hunting’ agents. We propose considering not only the inventor’s role in perceiving serendipity, but also how that inventor’s perception may be enhanced to increase the opportunity for serendipity. We explore the role of environment and how we can better enable serendipitous discoveries to find a home more readily and immediately
Interaction Issues in Computer Aided Semantic\ud Annotation of Multimedia
The CASAM project aims to provide a tool for more efficient and effective annotation of multimedia documents through collaboration between a user and a system performing an automated analysis of the media content. A critical part of the project is to develop a user interface which best supports both the user and the system through optimal human-computer interaction. In this paper we discuss the work undertaken, the proposed user interface and underlying interaction issues which drove its development
Predictive User Modeling with Actionable Attributes
Different machine learning techniques have been proposed and used for
modeling individual and group user needs, interests and preferences. In the
traditional predictive modeling instances are described by observable
variables, called attributes. The goal is to learn a model for predicting the
target variable for unseen instances. For example, for marketing purposes a
company consider profiling a new user based on her observed web browsing
behavior, referral keywords or other relevant information. In many real world
applications the values of some attributes are not only observable, but can be
actively decided by a decision maker. Furthermore, in some of such applications
the decision maker is interested not only to generate accurate predictions, but
to maximize the probability of the desired outcome. For example, a direct
marketing manager can choose which type of a special offer to send to a client
(actionable attribute), hoping that the right choice will result in a positive
response with a higher probability. We study how to learn to choose the value
of an actionable attribute in order to maximize the probability of a desired
outcome in predictive modeling. We emphasize that not all instances are equally
sensitive to changes in actions. Accurate choice of an action is critical for
those instances, which are on the borderline (e.g. users who do not have a
strong opinion one way or the other). We formulate three supervised learning
approaches for learning to select the value of an actionable attribute at an
instance level. We also introduce a focused training procedure which puts more
emphasis on the situations where varying the action is the most likely to take
the effect. The proof of concept experimental validation on two real-world case
studies in web analytics and e-learning domains highlights the potential of the
proposed approaches
Ontological Matchmaking in Recommender Systems
The electronic marketplace offers great potential for the recommendation of
supplies. In the so called recommender systems, it is crucial to apply
matchmaking strategies that faithfully satisfy the predicates specified in the
demand, and take into account as much as possible the user preferences. We
focus on real-life ontology-driven matchmaking scenarios and identify a number
of challenges, being inspired by such scenarios. A key challenge is that of
presenting the results to the users in an understandable and clear-cut fashion
in order to facilitate the analysis of the results. Indeed, such scenarios
evoke the opportunity to rank and group the results according to specific
criteria. A further challenge consists of presenting the results to the user in
an asynchronous fashion, i.e. the 'push' mode, along with the 'pull' mode, in
which the user explicitly issues a query, and displays the results. Moreover,
an important issue to consider in real-life cases is the possibility of
submitting a query to multiple providers, and collecting the various results.
We have designed and implemented an ontology-based matchmaking system that
suitably addresses the above challenges. We have conducted a comprehensive
experimental study, in order to investigate the usability of the system, the
performance and the effectiveness of the matchmaking strategies with real
ontological datasets.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figure
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