Graph-Based User Modeling: Make the most out of (freely available) personal data – Prof. Tsvi Kuflik – Wednesday, december 16

Wednesday, December 16 at 16:00-18:00

N13 room,  ground floor, Department of Engineering

Via della Vasca Navale, 79, Roma

 

Over the years, the area of user modeling (and later on recommendation systems) produced a variety of user modeling techniques. These techniques were developed for modeling and representing the users in order to better understand their needs and provide them with personalized services. The common techniques in use are collaborative filtering and content/feature based, while in specific domains we can find also case-based, demographic and overlay approaches. However, the knowledge represented by these techniques is quite limited. In recent years, with the advent of web 2.0 and the social and semantic web, personal information becomes widely available online in various forms. This poses opportunities as well as major challenges for the classical user modeling approaches – how to make use of this information to enhance user modeling? As a potential solution to the problem, we are exploring the idea of graph-based user modeling representation, as an integrative framework that enables standard and simple representation of users’ characteristics, not limited to a specific technique. In various studies we demonstrated the potential benefits of this approach and it’s possible contribution to user modeling and recommender systems. The talk will briefly present the general idea of graph-based user modeling as well as research results that demonstrate its contribution to a variety of domains and scenarios.