Engaging end-user driven recommender systems: personalization through web augmentation

In the past decades recommender systems have become a powerful tool to improve personalization on the Web. Yet, many popular websites lack such functionality, its implementation usually requires certain technical skills, and, above all, its introduction is beyond the scope and control of end-users. To alleviate these problems, this paper presents a novel tool to empower end-users without programming skills, without any involvement of website providers, to embed personalized recommendations of items into arbitrary websites on client-side. For this we have developed a generic meta-model to capture recommender system configuration parameters in general as well as in a web augmentation context. Thereupon, we have implemented a wizard in the form of an easy-to-use browser plug-in, allowing the generation of so-called user scripts, which are executed in the browser to engage collaborative filtering functionality from a provided external rest service. We discuss functionality and limitations of the approach, and in a study with end-users we assess the usability and show its suitability for combining recommender systems with web augmentation techniques, aiming to empower end-users to implement controllable recommender applications for a more personalized browsing experience.Fil: Wischenbart, Martin. Johannes Kepler University Linz; AustriaFil: Firmenich, Sergio Damian. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Rossi, Gustavo Héctor. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Bosetti, Gabriela Alejandra. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Informática; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata; ArgentinaFil: Kapsammer, Elisabeth. Johannes Kepler University Linz; Austri

Where are your Manners? Sharing Best Community Practices in the Web 2.0

The Web 2.0 fosters the creation of communities by offering users a wide array of social software tools. While the success of these tools is based on their ability to support different interaction patterns among users by imposing as few limitations as possible, the communities they support are not free of rules (just think about the posting rules in a community forum or the editing rules in a thematic wiki). In this paper we propose a framework for the sharing of best community practices in the form of a (potentially rule-based) annotation layer that can be integrated with existing Web 2.0 community tools (with specific focus on wikis). This solution is characterized by minimal intrusiveness and plays nicely within the open spirit of the Web 2.0 by providing users with behavioral hints rather than by enforcing the strict adherence to a set of rules.Comment: ACM symposium on Applied Computing, Honolulu : \'Etats-Unis d'Am\'erique (2009

Personalizing the web: A tool for empowering end-users to customize the web through browser-side modification

167 p.Web applications delegate to the browser the final rendering of their pages. Thispermits browser-based transcoding (a.k.a. Web Augmentation) that can be ultimately singularized for eachbrowser installation. This creates an opportunity for Web consumers to customize their Web experiences.This vision requires provisioning adequate tooling that makes Web Augmentation affordable to laymen.We consider this a special class of End-User Development, integrating Web Augmentation paradigms.The dominant paradigm in End-User Development is scripting languages through visual languages.This thesis advocates for a Google Chrome browser extension for Web Augmentation. This is carried outthrough WebMakeup, a visual DSL programming tool for end-users to customize their own websites.WebMakeup removes, moves and adds web nodes from different web pages in order to avoid tabswitching, scrolling, the number of clicks and cutting and pasting. Moreover, Web Augmentationextensions has difficulties in finding web elements after a website updating. As a consequence, browserextensions give up working and users might stop using these extensions. This is why two differentlocators have been implemented with the aim of improving web locator robustness

Crowdsourcing Mobile Web Applications

Building Mobile Web or Hypermedia Applications is usually difficult since there is a myriad of issues to take into account. Moreover adding support for personalized or context-aware behaviors goes far beyond the possibilities of many kinds of organizations that intend to build this kind of software (museums, city halls, etc). In this article we present a novel approach to delegate part of the effort in building mobile Web software to developers outside those organizations or even to final users. We show that this approach is feasible, light and practical and present a set of experiments we developed to verify our claims.Publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, vol. 8295).Facultad de InformáticaLaboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

Crowdsourcing Mobile Web Applications

Building Mobile Web or Hypermedia Applications is usually difficult since there is a myriad of issues to take into account. Moreover adding support for personalized or context-aware behaviors goes far beyond the possibilities of many kinds of organizations that intend to build this kind of software (museums, city halls, etc). In this article we present a novel approach to delegate part of the effort in building mobile Web software to developers outside those organizations or even to final users. We show that this approach is feasible, light and practical and present a set of experiments we developed to verify our claims.Publicado en Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, vol. 8295).Facultad de InformáticaLaboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

NASA Pilot-Engaged Expert Response Using IBM Watson Technology: Prototype Evaluation of Knowledge Retrieval System

NASA Langley Research Center and IBM have been investigating the use of IBM Watson technology in aerospace research and development. One application of Watson technology is the Pilot-Engaged Expert Response (PEER) use case. The PEER system is envisioned as an in-cockpit advisor that will act as a source of situationally-relevant information for pilots and other flight crew members to assist in decision making about real-time events and situations that arise in the course of aircraft operations. PEER will make available vast stores of knowledge and information quickly and directly, putting important informational resources where they are needed most. IBM has worked with NASA to develop an architecture and articulate a roadmap for the development of the PEER system. That vision is built around Watson Discovery Advisor (WDA) software solution, derived from IBM's Jeopardy!-winning automatic question answering system. PEER makes use of WDA's sophisticated question-answering capabilities as its core, adding important User Interface components and other customizations for the cockpit environment, including communication with flight systems and other external data sources. The development plan for PEER includes four development stages, with the current project constituting the first phase. In this project, a prototype instance of PEER was successfully adapted to the aviation domain, enabling users to ask questions about aviation topics and receive useful and accurate answers to these questions. Major tasks accomplished include the development of procedures for domain adaptation through automatic lexicon extraction from domain glossaries; generation of question-answer training data which was used to train the system; and assessment of the effectiveness of domain adaptation, which showed a dramatic improvement in the ability of the PEER system to answer domain-relevant questions. In addition, the vision for the PEER system was pushed forward by the articulation of a plan for the automatic enhancement of question-answering with contextual information. This initial phase focused on two main goals: 1) the targeted domain adaptation of the underlying WDA system to the aviation domain; and, 2) the design of the software systems needed to leverage flight-contextual data. Domain adaptation of the WDA system proceeds via three main activities: Domain data ingestion, lexical customization and model training. A textual corpus consisting of 1,147 individual documents with more than 7.5 million words of text was ingested into the system and this served as the basis of all further development. A domain lexicon of over 3,500 aviation-domain terms was semi-automatically generated from domain documents and used to train the system. In addition, a set of over 500 question-answer (QA) pairs relevant to the PEER use case was developed; these were used to train and assess the system. These important first steps established the basis for the PEER system. In addition, steps were taken towards the integration of the PEER system into the cockpit environment with the development of a functional design for the Contextual Data Augmentation (CDA) subsystem. This subsystem brings to bear contextual data to improve system responses. It has three main submodules: the Contextual Data Collection module, the Contextual Data Selection module, and the Contextual QA Augmentation module. These modules form a processing pipeline that addresses the problems associated with automatically integrating information from external resources into the knowledge-retrieval mechanism

From Search Engines to Augmented Search Services: An End-User Development Approach

The World Wide Web is a vast and continuously changing source of information where searching is a frequent, and sometimes critical, user task. Searching is not always the user’s primary goal but an ancillary task that is performed to find complementary information allowing to complete another task. In this paper, we explore primary and/or ancillary search tasks and propose an approach for simplifying the user interaction during search tasks. Rather than focusing on dedicated search engines, our approach allows the user to abstract search engines already provided by Web applications into pervasive search services that will be available for performing searches from any other Web site. We also propose allowing users to manage the way in which the search results are presented and some possible interactions. In order to illustrate the feasibility of this approach, we have built a support tool based on a plug-in architecture that allows users to integrate new search services (created by themselves by means of visual tools) and execute them in the context of both kinds of searches. A case study illustrates the use of such tool. We also present the results of two evaluations that demonstrate the feasibility of the approach and the benefits in its use

Personalizing the web: A tool for empowering end-users to customize the web through browser-side modification

167 p.Web applications delegate to the browser the final rendering of their pages. Thispermits browser-based transcoding (a.k.a. Web Augmentation) that can be ultimately singularized for eachbrowser installation. This creates an opportunity for Web consumers to customize their Web experiences.This vision requires provisioning adequate tooling that makes Web Augmentation affordable to laymen.We consider this a special class of End-User Development, integrating Web Augmentation paradigms.The dominant paradigm in End-User Development is scripting languages through visual languages.This thesis advocates for a Google Chrome browser extension for Web Augmentation. This is carried outthrough WebMakeup, a visual DSL programming tool for end-users to customize their own websites.WebMakeup removes, moves and adds web nodes from different web pages in order to avoid tabswitching, scrolling, the number of clicks and cutting and pasting. Moreover, Web Augmentationextensions has difficulties in finding web elements after a website updating. As a consequence, browserextensions give up working and users might stop using these extensions. This is why two differentlocators have been implemented with the aim of improving web locator robustness

Revealing textual polarity patterns with a browser extension

We describe a new method to combine sentiment analysis and web augmentation into a browser-based platform enabling visualization of a web document's opinionated expressions and patterns of polarity. The Augmentator extension assists the reader recognizing keywords and paragraphs of polarity sentiment with the idea that by moving a part of the problem of text analysis from statistics and data mining into the realm of human vision and recognition, non-professionals can hopefully benefit more easily from powerful analysis and visualization tools.ye