Adaptive User Interfaces for Personalized Services

Speaker: Pat Langley, principal research scientist in the Information
and Communications Laboratory at Georgia Tech Research Institute
and director of the Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise

Abstract: The Internet has made available massive amounts of information
and given users more choices than ever before, but all too often the
result is more confusion than satisfaction. Intelligent assistants can
help people filter relevant information and guide their choices, but
users have different goals and distinctive tastes. In this talk, I
report work adaptive user interfaces -- interactive systems that
automatically personalize their content to individual users. These
incorporate technology and principles from machine learning,
intelligent agents, and human-computer interaction to improve the
user's experience. I describe a number of prototype systems, including
a personalized navigation aide, an adaptive news reader, and a
conversational destination advisor. Along the way, I consider design
decisions about the problem formulation, the representation of user
profiles, the unobtrusive collection of user feedback, and the effective
utilization of inferred profiles. I claim that progress on personalized
services depends not on development of new algorithms, but rather
on the integration of existing methods in novel ways.

This talk describes joint work with Nicolas Fiechter, Melinda Gervasio,
Wayne Iba, Mehmet Goker, Seth Rogers, and Cynthia Thompson.

--------------------

Bio: Pat Langley, Ph.D., serves as Principal Research Scientist in the Information
and Communications Laboratory at Georgia Tech Research Institute
and as Director of the Institute for the Study of Learning and Expertise.
He has contributed to artificial intelligence and cognitive science for more
than 40 years, having published over 300 papers and five books on these
topics. Dr. Langley developed some of the first computational approaches
to scientific knowledge discovery, and he was an early champion of both
experimental studies of machine learning and its application to real-world
problems. He is the founding editor of two journals, Machine Learning
in 1986 and Advances in Cognitive Systems in 2012, and he is a Fellow
of both AAAI and the Cognitive Science Society. Dr. Langley's current
research focuses on architectures for embodied intelligent agents and
induction of explanatory scientific models.

----

IPaT: GVU Lunch Lecture Series