Adaptive Interfaces for Ubiquitous Web Access

The World Web Wide gives unprecedented access to Newspapers, magazines, shopping catalogs, restaurant guides, and classified ads and other types of information. All this information, however, used to be accessible only while users are tethered to a computer at home or in an office. Wireless data and voice access to this vast store allows unprecedented access to information from any location at any time.

The presentation of this information must be tailored to the constraints of mobile devices. Although browsing and searching are the acceptable methods of locating information on the wired web, those operations soon become cumbersome and inefficient in the wireless setting and impossible in voice interfaces. Small screens, slower connections, high latency, limited input capabilities, and the serial nature of voice interfaces present new challenges. Agents that select information for the user are a convenience when displaying information on a 19-inch desktop monitor accessed over a broadband connection; they are essential on a handheld wireless device. This talk discusses adaptive personalization technology that makes all of this information available to the mobile user. The goal of adaptive personalization is to increase the usage and acceptance of mobile access through content that is easily accessible and personally relevant.

Computers that Recognize and Respond to User Emotion

Did you like that or not? Did the system's choice of adaptation aggravate you more, or did it bring about an expression of gratefulness? Does this interest you or bore you? Recognition of the effects an action has on a user is a key part of adapting successfully to users; how can machines be enabled to recognize affective expressions such as frustration, interest, anger, or joy? And, what are guidelines for designing their response, especially given that recognition is likely to not be perfect? This talk will present new technologies under development for sensing and responding appropriately to human affective expressions. Current applications include usability feedback, health behavior change, learning companions, and human-robot interaction.

The advantages of explicitly representing problem spaces

Abstract: Newell and Simon (1972) coined the term "problem space" for a virtual structure: all possible lines of reasoning that can be employed by an agent to solve a problem. For certain toy problems (e.g., Tower of Hanoi), the problem space can be represented explicitly as labelled, directed graph. For non-toy problems, cognitive scientists have sometimes employed the concept of a problem space to analyze tasks, but seem to feel that explicit representation of the whole problem space for a problem is probably not worthwhile, and perhaps not even feasible. I will present techniques developed over a decade of research that make explicit representation of large problem spaces feasible. I will demonstrate how explicit representations of problem spaces have been used in systems that do non-trivial user modelling, task analysis, intelligent tutoring, and natural language dialogues.