Alfred Kobsa
Selected Research Projects
Cooperation Awareness and
Privacy
This project aims at analyzing privacy and awareness needs of
[distributed] workgroups, and at supporting workgroups in
balancing the demand for awareness information with individual
privacy preferences.
| Researchers |
Alfred Kobsa (Faculty)
Sameer Patil (Ph.D. student)
Doree Seligmann and Ajita John, Avaya Research
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| Duration: |
2002-2010 |
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| Funding: |
NSF
("mid-size"
ITR grant)
NSF (for
collaboration with the European PRIME
project)
NSF (large HCC grant)
|
|
| Results: |
J25
J26,
J27,
C34,
C36,
C37,
C42,
C46,
C52,
C53,
B17,
B23, W21,
W27,
O15
|
 |
Privacy as a
Design Requirement for Personalized Systems
Privacy demands of Internet users and international (and future
national) privacy legislation have an impact on the collection of
personal data in web-based systems. This project studies
specifically the impacts on "personalized" web-based systems,
which cater their interaction to each individual user, collect
considerable amounts of personal data for this purpose, and "lay
them in stock" for possible future adaptation. The project
analyzes and documents these privacy requirements and provides
solutions for the software architecture and the user interface of
personalized systems to cater to privacy constraints of each
individual user and their jurisdictions.
| Researchers: |
Alfred Kobsa (Faculty)
Yang Wang (Ph.D. student)
Max
Teltzrow (visiting Ph.D. student)
Zhaoqi "Stella" Chen (Ph.D. student)
|
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| Duration: |
2001 - 2010
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| Funding: |
CRITO
(2001-03), NSF
(since July 2003), Humboldt
Foundation (since Oct. 2004, for collaboration with Humboldt
University), Google Research Award
|
|
| Results: |
J17, J23,
C25,
C37,
C38,
C43,
C47,
B15,
B16,
B20,
B21,
W15, W16, W17, W18,
W19
, W22,
W25,
O32
Catalog of requirements
imposed by international privacy laws
|
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Privacy through
Pseudonymity in User-Adaptive Systems
Adaptive systems are generally better able to cater to users the
more data their user modeling systems collect and process about
them. This project analyzes security requirements to
guarantee privacy in user-adaptive systems and explores ways to
keep users anonymous whilst fully preserving personalized
interaction with them. User anonymization in personalized systems
goes beyond current models in that not only users must remain
anonymous but also the user modeling system that maintains their
personal data. Moreover, users' trust in anonymity can be expected
to lead to more extensive and frank interaction, hence to more and
better data about the user, and thus to better personalization. A
reference model for pseudonymous and secure user modeling has been
developed and implemented that meets many of the proposed
requirements.
Success Factors
of Information Visualization Systems
Research in information visualization aims at
leveraging human perceptual abilities for data analysis, by
presenting information not as numbers and text but in visual
form. Effective visual displays must therefore be designed in
such a way that users can easily obtain an overview of the data,
spot outliers, patterns and correlations, and see the changes
that will occur if some parameters become altered.
Visualizations need to make such significant facts salient for
human perception. This identifies "success factors" of
visualization systems for multivariate data, by conducting
experiments both with analysts working individually on a
computer screen, and with groups of analysts collaborating in
front of a large-sized display.
| Researchers: |
Alfred Kobsa (Faculty)
Victor Gonzales (Ph.D. student)
Several undergraduate students
|
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| Duration: |
Since Jan. 2001 |
|
| Funding: |
CRITO |
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| Results: |
J21,
C24,
C27
, C29,
C30,
C31,
C32,
C35,
O17
|
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User Modeling as an
Open Learning Process (LaboUr)
Generic user modeling systems so far pursued a strongly
knowledge-based approach. Heuristics regarding assumptions that
can be made about users when certain observations were made about
them had to be empirically found beforehand and expressed in
knowledge representation mechanisms. The project LaboUr developed
a generic prototype that incorporated user modeling as an open
learning process. "Open" thereby means that the user modeling
system can process any kind of assumption about the user, and can
communicate with any kind of source that provides information
about the user. Learning "process" refers to the continuous
incremental processing, abstraction and revision of assumptions
about the user based on the observed user behavior.
| Researchers: |
Alfred Kobsa (Faculty)
Wolfgang Pohl (Post-Doc.)
Ingo Schwab (Ph.D. student)
Ramin Yasdi (Researcher)
|
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| Duration: |
Aug. 1997 – Nov. 2000 |
|
| Funding: |
German
Research Foundation |
|
| Results: |
J18,
W12
Schwab I., Pohl W. and Koychev, I.
(2000). Learning to Recommend from Positive Evidence,
Proceedings of Intelligent User Interfaces 2000, ACM
Press, 241-247.
Pohl W. (1997). LaboUr - Machine Learning for User
Modeling. Proc. of the Seventh International
Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. Amsterdam:
Elsevier.
|
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Adaptive and
Adaptable Interactions for Multimedia Telecommunications
(AVANTI)
The World Wide Web is going to be the leading online information
medium for some years to come and will most likely become the
standard gateway for citizens to the “information highway”. Already
today, visitors of web sites are generally heterogeneous and have
different needs, and this is likely to increase in the future. The
aim of the AVANTI project in which 12 organizations collaborate is
to cater hypermedia information to these individual needs by
adapting the content and the presentation of web pages to each
individual user. The special needs of elderly and disabled users are
also partly considered. A model of the characteristics of user
groups, individual users and usage environments, and a domain model
are exploited in the adaptation process. One aim of this research is
to verify that adaptation and user modeling techniques that were
hitherto mostly used for catering interactive software systems to
able-bodied users also prove useful for adaptation to users with
special needs. Another original aspect is the development of a
network-wide user modeling server that can concurrently accommodate
the user modeling needs of several applications and several
instances of an application within a distributed computing
environment.
| Researchers: |
Alfred Kobsa (Faculty)
Josef Fink (Ph.D. student)
Andreas Nill (Ph.D. student)
Igor Jaceniak (Researcher)
Armin Hüttenhain (Researcher)
Gabriele Nordbrock (Researcher)
Several undergraduate students
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| Duration: |
Aug. 1995 – Nov. 1999 |
|
| Funding: |
European Commission (ACTS Programme)
Collaborative research of 12 institutions |
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| Results: |
J12,
C14,
C15,
C16,
C17,
C18,
C19,
C20,
C22,
B12,
N10,
O11 |
|
A User Modeling
Shell System (BGP-MS)
This project developed BGP-MS, a user modeling shell system that can
assist interactive software systems in adapting to their current
users by taking the users’ presumed knowledge, beliefs, and goals
into account. It offers applications several methods for
communicating observations concerning the user to BGPMS, and for
obtaining information on currently held assumptions about the user
from BGP-MS. It provides a choice of two integrated formalisms for
representing beliefs and goals, and includes several types of
inferences for drawing additional assumptions based on an initial
interview, observed user actions, and stereotypical knowledge about
pre-defined user subgroups. BGP-MS is a customizable software system
that is independent from applications, operates concurrently with
them, and interacts with them through inter-process communication.
For tailoring BGP-MS to a specific application domain, the developer
must select those components of BGP-MS that are needed in this
domain and fill them with relevant domain-dependent user modeling
knowledge.
| Researchers: |
Alfred Kobsa (Faculty)
Wolfgang Pohl (Ph.D. student)
Jörg Höhle (Ph.D. student)
Several undergraduate students
|
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| Duration: |
Feb. 1992 – Aug. 1997 |
|
| Funding: |
German
Research Foundation |
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| Results: |
J10,
C12,
C13,
C21,
C23,
C26,
W6,
W8,
W9,
W10
Server software: ftp://ftp.gmd.de/gmd/bgp-ms
Draft standard: O10
Wolfgang Pohl (1997): Logic-Based Representation and
Reasoning for User Modeling Shell Systems. Berlin:
Academic Publishing Corporation – infix.
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A Natural-Language
Access System to Expert Systems (XTRA)
The XTRA access system to expert systems aims at rendering the
interaction with expert systems easier for inexperienced users. XTRA
communicates with the user in a natural language (German), extracts
data relevant to the expert system from his/her natural-language
input, answers user queries as to terminology, and provides
user-accommodated natural-language verbalizations of results and
explanations provided by the expert system. A number of novel
artificial intelligence techniques have been emplozed in the
development of the system, including the combination of
natural-language user input with user gestures on the terminal
screen, referent identification with the aid of four different
knowledge sources, simultaneous communication of the access system
with the user and the expert system, fusion of two complementary
knowledge bases into a single one, and the design of a
natural-language generation component which allows for a controlled
interaction between the "what-to-say" and the "how-to-say" parts to
yield a more natural output. XTRA is being deveoped independenly of
any specific expert system. In its first application, the access to
an expert system in the income tax domain is being realized.
| Researchers: |
Wolfgang Wahlster (Faculty)
Alfred Kobsa (Co-director)
Roman Jansen-Winkeln (Ph.D. student)
Jürgen Allgaier (Ph.D. student)
Carola Reddig (Ph.D. student)
Dagmar Schmauks (Researcher)
Several undergraduate students
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| Duration: |
May 1985 – Sept. 1991 |
|
| Funding: |
German
Research Foundation |
|
| Results: |
J5,
J6, J7, J8, J9, C7, C8, C9, C10, C11, B8, B9, W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, N6, N7, N8, N9, O6 |
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