User Modeling

This paper describes the use of adaptation patterns in the task of formulating standards for adaptive educational hypermedia (AEH) systems that is currently under investigation by the EU ADAPT project. Within this project, design dimensions for high granularity patterns have been established. In this paper we focus on detailing lower granularity adaptive patterns based upon learning styles. Several patterns from existing AEH system case studies are identified and classified according to an extended learning style "onion" model. This model forms the basis of a learning style taxonomy, introduced here, whose components determine adaptation patterns for AEH. These patterns are of importance both for authoring, as well as for interfacing between adaptive hypermedia systems. From an authoring point of view, these patterns may be used to establish a fine-grain approach to instructional strategies that can be implemented in AEH systems, as a response to a particular learning style. The implementation of this adaptation pattern taxonomy is discussed, both generally and in detail.

Nowadays modern society requires that every citizen always updates and improves her/his knowledge and skills necessary to working and researching. E-learning or distance learning gives everyone a chance to study at anytime and anywhere with full support of computer technology and network. Adaptive learning, a variant of e-learning, aims to satisfy the demand of personalization in learning. Learners’ information and characteristics such as knowledge, goal, experience, interest, and background are the most important to adaptive system. These characteristics are organized in a structure called learner model (or user model) and the system or computer software that builds up and manipulates learner model is called user modeling system or learner modeling system. In this book, I propose a learner model that consists of three essential kinds of information about learners such as knowledge, learning style and learning history. Such three characteristics form a triangle and so this learner model is called Triangular Learner Model (TLM). The book contains seven chapters, which covers mathematical features of TLM. Chapter I is a survey of user model, user modeling, and adaptive learning. Chapter II introduces the general architecture of the proposed TLM and a user modeling system named Zebra. Chapter III, IV, V describes three sub-models of TLM such as knowledge sub-model, learning style sub-model, and learning history sub-model in full of mathematical formulas and fundamental methods. Chapter VI gives some approaches to evaluate TLM and Zebra. Chapter VII summarizes the research and discusses future trend of Zebra.

Learning style models constitute a valuable tool for improving individual learning by the use of adaptation techniques based on them. In this paper, we present how the benefit of considering learning styles with adaptation purposes, as part of the user model, can be extended to the context of collaborative learning as a key feature for group formation. We explore the effects that the combination of students with different learning styles in specific groups may have in the final results of the tasks accomplished by them collaboratively. With this aim, a case study with 166 students of computer science has been carried out, from which conclusions are drawn. We also describe how an existing web-based system can take advantage of learning style information in order to form more productive groups. Our ongoing work concerning the automatic extraction of grouping rules starting from data about previous interactions within the system is also outlined. Finally, we present our challenges, related to the continuous improvement of collaboration by the use and dynamic modification of automatic grouping rules.

Dynamic aspects of Information Retrieval (IR), including changes found in data, users and systems, are increasingly being utilized in search engines and information filtering systems. Existing IR techniques are limited in their ability to optimize over changes, learn with minimal computational footprint and be responsive and adaptive. The objective of this tutorial is to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to Dynamic Information Retrieval Modeling, the statistical modeling of IR systems that can adapt to change. It will cover techniques ranging from classic relevance feedback to the latest applications of partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) and a handful of useful algorithms and tools for solving IR problems incorporating dynamics.

Creating an efficient user knowledge model is a crucial task for web-based adaptive learning environments in different domains. It is often a challenge to determine exactly what type of domain dependent data will be stored and how it will be evaluated by a user modeling system. The most important disadvantage of these models is that they classify the knowledge of users without taking into account the weight differences among the domain dependent data of users. For this purpose, both the probabilistic and the instance-based models have been developed and commonly used in the user modeling systems. In this study a powerful, efficient and simple ‘Intuitive Knowledge Classifier’ method is proposed and presented to model the domain dependent data of users. A domain independent object model, the user modeling approach and the weight-tuning method are combined with instance-based classification algorithm to improve classification performances of well-known the Bayes and the k-nearest neighbor-based methods. The proposed knowledge classifier intuitively explores the optimum weight values of students’ features on their knowledge class first. Then it measures the distances among the students depending on their data and the values of weights. Finally, it uses the dissimilarities in the classification process to determine their knowledge class. The experimental studies have shown that the weighting of domain dependent data of students and combination of user modeling algorithms and population-based searching approach play an essential role in classifying performance of user modeling system. The proposed system improves the classification accuracy of instance-based user modeling approach for all distance metrics and different k-values.

Recent studies have shown that the use of educational games during learning process is dramatically increased. Furthermore, researchers suggest the attachment of adaptive features in order to motivate students and assess their knowledge level on a specific educational subject. In this paper, we present an educational browser-based game with coins that contributes to understanding better the addition process in elementary education. The game encompasses user modeling and adaptive techniques. It determines students’ knowledge level and helps them outcome difficulties and obtain fluency in arithmetic addition skills.

Our research agenda focuses on building software agents that can employ user modeling techniques to facilitate information access and management tasks. Personal assistant agents embody a clearly beneficial application of intelligent agent technology. A particular kind of assistant agents, recommender systems, can be used to recommend items of interest to users. To be successful, such systems should be able to

Literature on the modeling and simulation of complex adaptive systems (cas) has primarily advanced vertically in different scientific domains with scientists developing a variety of domain-specific approaches and applications. However, while cas researchers are inherently interested in an interdisciplinary comparison of models, to the best of our knowledge, there is currently no single unified framework for facilitating the development, comparison, communication and validation of models across different scientific domains. In this thesis, we propose first steps towards such a unified framework using a combination of agent-based and complex network-based modeling approaches and guidelines formulated in the form of a set of four levels of usage, which allow multidisciplinary researchers to adopt a suitable framework level on the basis of available data types, their research study objectives and expected outcomes, thus allowing them to better plan and conduct their respective research case studies. Firstly, the complex network modeling level of the proposed framework entails the development of appropriate complex network models for the case where interaction data of cas components is available, with the aim of detecting emergent patterns in the cas under study. The exploratory agent-based modeling level of the proposed framework allows for the development of proof-of-concept models for the cas system, primarily for purposes of exploring feasibility of further research. Descriptive agent-based modeling level of the proposed framework allows for the use of a formal step-by-step approach for developing agent-based models coupled with a quantitative complex network and pseudocode-based specification of the model, which will, in turn, facilitate interdisciplinary cas model comparison and knowledge transfer. Finally, the validated agent-based modeling level of the proposed framework is concerned with the building of in-simulation verification and validation of agent-based models using a proposed Virtual Overlay Multiagent System approach for use in a systematic team-oriented approach to developing models. The proposed framework is evaluated and validated using seven detailed case study examples selected from various scientific domains including ecology, social sciences and a range of complex adaptive communication networks. The successful case studies demonstrate the potential of the framework in appealing to multidisciplinary researchers as a methodological approach to the modeling and simulation of cas by facilitating effective communication and knowledge transfer across scientific disciplines without the requirement of extensive learning curves.

Feedback on player experience and behaviour can be invaluable to game designers, but there is need for specialised knowledge discovery tools to deal with high volume playtest data. We describe a study with a commercial third-person shooter, in which integrated player activity and experience data was captured and mined for design-relevant knowledge. We demonstrate that association rule learning and rule templates can be used to extract meaningful rules relating player activity and experience during combat. We ...

ABSTRACT The importance and concern given to the autonomy and independence of elderly people and patients suffering from some kind of disability has been growing significantly in the last few decades. Intelligent wheelchairs (IW) are technologies that can increase the autonomy and independence of this kind of population and are nowadays a very active research area. This paper presents a Data Analysis System (DAS) that provides an adapted command language to an user of the IW. This command language is a set of input sequences that can be created using inputs from an input device or a combination of the inputs available in a multimodal interface. The results show that there are statistical evidences to affirm that the mean of the evaluation of the DAS is higher than the mean of the evaluation of the command language recommend by the health specialist (p value = 0.002) with a sample of 11 cerebral palsy users. This work demonstrates that it is possible to adapt an intelligent wheelchair interface to the user even when the users present heterogeneous and severe physical constraints.

""Computer-based learning has become a common phenomenon in the modern age. Many distance-learning systems distribute educational resources on the Internet and indeed entire study programmes are now widely available online. Such a large amount of content and information can be intimidating to learners, who may exhibit different individual characteristics, such as variation in goals, interests, motivation and/or learning preferences. This suggests that a uniform approach taken by learning environments to deliver materials and resources to students is not appropriate and that personalisation of such materials/resources should address users’ differences to provide a customised learning experience, thus enhancing its effectiveness, lowering drop-out rates and maintaining high student motivation.

This thesis addresses the latter issue of learning preferences, specifically investigating learning styles as an adaptation mechanism for personalised computer-based learning. A number of previous studies indicated the positive effect that this kind of adaptation provides, but under closer examination these were not conducted in a scientifically rigorous manner and thus their findings are somewhat limited. This research utilises a quantitative and highly objective approach to investigate visual/verbal and sequential/global learning styles in different user groups. Three user trials were carried out to discover whether there were any benefits to using these learning styles for studying in an adapted environment.

Overall, no statistically significant benefits were found and these findings now shed doubt as to whether learning styles are indeed an effective mechanism for personalised learning.""

In this paper we are going to show how to discover interesting prediction rules from student usage information to improve adaptive web courses. We have used AHA! to make courses that adapt both the presentation and the navigation depending on the level of knowledge that each particular student has. We have performed several modifications in AHA! to specialize it and power it in the educational area. Our objective is to discover relations between all the picked-up usage data (reading times, difficulty levels and test results) from student executions and show the most interesting to the teacher so that he can carry out the appropriate modifications in the course to improve it.

Internet advertising is a fast growing business which has proved to be significantly important in digital economics. It is vitally important for both web search engines and online content providers and publishers because web advertising provides them with major sources of revenue. Its presence is increasingly important for the whole media industry due to the influence of the Web. For advertisers, it is a smarter alternative to traditional marketing media such as TVs and newspapers. As the web evolves and data collection continues, the design of methods for more targeted, interactive, and friendly advertising may have a major impact on the way our digital economy evolves, and to aid societal development.
Towards this goal mathematically well-grounded Computational Advertising methods are becoming necessary and will continue to develop as a fundamental tool towards the Web. As a vibrant new discipline, Internet advertising requires effort from different research domains including Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Data Mining and Analytic, Statistics, Economics, and even Psychology to predict and understand user behaviours. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on Internet advertising, discussing and classifying the research issues, identifying the recent technologies, and suggesting its future directions. To have a comprehensive picture, we first start with a brief history, introduction, and classification of the industry and present a schematic view of the new advertising ecosystem. We then introduce four major participants, namely advertisers, online publishers, ad exchanges and web users; and through analysing and discussing the major research problems and existing solutions from their perspectives respectively, we discover and aggregate the fundamental problems that characterise the newly-formed research field and capture its potential future prospects.

Abstract Preference elicitation is a challenging fundamental problem when designing recommender systems. In the present work we propose a content-based technique to automatically generate a semantic representation of the user's musical preferences directly from audio. Starting from an explicit set of music tracks provided by the user as evidence of his/her preferences, we infer high-level semantic descriptors for each track obtaining a user model. To prove the benefits of our proposal, we present two applications of our technique ...

The results presented in this paper come from an exploratory study of 19,379 mind maps created by 11,179 users from the mind mapping applications ‘Docear’ and ‘MindMeister’. The objective was to find out how mind maps are structured and which information they contain. Results include: A typical mind map is rather small, with 31 nodes on average (median), whereas each node usually contains between one to three words. In 66.12% of cases there are few notes, if any, and the number of hyperlinks tends to be rather low, too, but depends upon the mind mapping application. Most mind maps are edited only on one (60.76%) or two days (18.41%). A typical user creates around 2.7 mind maps (mean) a year. However, there are exceptions which create a long tail. One user created 243 mind maps, the largest mind map contained 52,182 nodes, one node contained 7,497 words and one mind map was edited on 142 days.

This paper describes the development of an educational adventure game which aims to be useful in learning arithmetic. The main game platform communicates with several arithmetic mini games. A student modeling component is used to create a profile for every student and grant adaptive features to the main game platform. Additionally, an error diagnosis component is also useful for evaluating students' errors and giving relative advice. The choice of adventure game genre was based to past research which revealed that adventure games can have beneficial effects in learning process.

Considering the increasingly complex media landscape and diversity of use, it is important to establish a common ground for identifying and describing the variety of ways in which people use new media technologies. Characterising the nature of media-user behaviour and distinctive user types is challenging and the literature offers little guidance in this regard. Hence, the present research aims to classify diverse user behaviours into meaningful categories of user types, according to the frequency of use, variety of use and content preferences. To reach a common framework, a review of the relevant research was conducted. An overview and meta-analysis of the literature (22 studies) regarding user typology was established and analysed with reference to (1) method, (2) theory, (3) media platform, (4) context and year, and (5) user types. Based on this examination, a unified Media-User Typology (MUT) is suggested. This initial MUT goes beyond the current research literature, by unifying all the existing and various user type models. A common MUT model can help the Human–Computer Interaction community to better understand both the typical users and the diversification of media-usage patterns more qualitatively. Developers of media systems can match the users’ preferences more precisely based on an MUT, in addition to identifying the target groups in the developing process. Finally, an MUT will allow a more nuanced approach when investigating the association between media usage and social implications such as the digital divide.

Canada There has been a continuous increase in the design and application of computer games for purposes other than entertainment in recent years. Serious games—games that motivate behaviour and retain attention in serious contexts — can change the attitudes, behaviours, and habits of players. These games for change have been shown to motivate behaviour change, persuade people, and promote learning using various persuasive strategies. However, persuasive strategies that motivate one player may demotivate another. In this article, we show the importance of tailoring games for change in the context of a game designed to improve healthy eating habits. We tailored a custom-designed game by adapting only the persuasive strategies employed; the game mechanics themselves did not vary. Tailoring the game design to players' personality type improved the effectiveness of the games in promoting positive attitudes, intention to change behaviour, and self-efficacy. Furthermore, we show that the benefits of tailoring the game intervention are not explained by the improved player experience, but directly by the choice of persuasive strategy employed. Designers and researchers of games for change can use our results to improve the efficacy of their game-based interventions.

With the rapid growth of information on the Web, the study of information searching has let to an increased interest. Information behaviour (IB) researchers and information systems (IS) developers are continuously exploring user - Web search interactions to understand and to help users to provide assistance with their information searching. In attempting to develop models of IB, several studies have identified various factors that govern user's information searching and information retrieval (IR), such as age, gender, prior knowledge and task complexity. However, how users' contextual factors, such as cognitive styles, affect Web search interactions has not been clearly explained by the current models of Web Searching and IR.

This study explores the influence of users' cognitive styles on their Web search behaviour. The main goal of the study is to enhance Web search models with a better understanding of how these cognitive styles affect Web searching. Modelling Web search behaviour with a greater understanding of user's cognitive styles can help information science researchers and IS designers to bridge the semantic gap between the user and the IS. To achieve the aims of the study, a user study with 50 participants was conducted. The study adopted a mixed method approach incorporating several data collection strategies to gather a range of qualitative and quantitative data. The study utilised pre-search and post-search questionnaires to collect the participants' demographic information and their level of satisfaction about the search interactions. Riding's (1991) Cognitive Style Analysis (CSA) test was used to assess the participants' cognitive styles. Participants completed three predesigned search tasks and the whole user - web search interactions, including thinkaloud, were captured using a monitoring program. Data analysis involved several qualitative and quantitative techniques: the quantitative data gave raise to detailed findings about users' Web searching and cognitive styles, the qualitative data enriched the findings with illustrative examples.

The study results provide valuable insights into Web searching behaviour among different cognitive style users. The findings of the study extend our understanding of Web search behaviour and how users search information on the Web. Three key study findings emerged: • Users' Web search behaviour was demonstrated through information searching strategies, Web navigation styles, query reformulation behaviour and information processing approaches while performing Web searches. The manner in which these Web search patterns were demonstrated varied among the users with different cognitive style groups.

• Users' cognitive styles influenced their information searching strategies, query reformulation behaviour, Web navigational styles and information processing approaches. Users with particular cognitive styles followed certain Web search patterns.

• Fundamental relationships were evident between users' cognitive styles and their Web search behaviours; and these relationships can be illustrated through modelling Web search behaviour. Two models that depict the associations between Web search interactions, user characteristics and users' cognitive styles were developed. These models provide a greater understanding of Web search behaviour from the user perspective, particularly how users' cognitive styles influence their Web search behaviour.

The significance of this research is twofold: it will provide insights for information science researchers, information system designers, academics, educators, trainers and librarians who want to better understand how users with different cognitive styles perform information searching on the Web; at the same time, it will provide assistance and support to the users. The major outcomes of this study are 1) a comprehensive analysis of how users search the Web; 2) extensive discussion on the implications of the models developed in this study for future work; and 3) a theoretical framework to bridge high-level search models and cognitive models.

In the past few years, the growing number of personal information shared on the Web (through Web 2.0 applications) increased awareness regarding privacy and personal data. Recent studies showed that privacy in Social Networks is a major concern when user profiles are publicly shared, revealing that most users are aware of privacy settings. Most Social Networks provide privacy settings restricting access to private data to those who are in the user’s friends lists (i.e. their “social graph”) such as Facebook’s privacy preferences. Yet, the studies show that users require more complex privacy settings as current systems do not meet their requirements. Hence, we propose a platform-independent system that allows end-users to set fine-grained privacy preferences for the creation of privacy-aware faceted user profiles on the Social Web.

This thesis introduced two novel reputation models to generate accurate item reputation scores using ratings data and the statistics of the dataset. It also presented an innovative method that incorporates reputation awareness in recommender systems by employing voting system methods to produce more accurate top-N item recommendations. Additionally, this thesis introduced a personalisation method for generating reputation scores based on users' interests, where a single item can have different reputation scores for different users. The personalised reputation scores are then used in the proposed reputation-aware recommender systems to enhance the recommendation quality.

Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have grown rapidly in recent years in the context of computing with smart mobile phones that typically allows the devices to function in an intelligent manner. Popular AI techniques include machine learning and deep learning methods, natural language processing, as well as knowledge representation and expert systems, can be used to make the target mobile applications intelligent and more effective. In this paper, we present a comprehensive view on "mobile data science and intelligent apps" in terms of concepts and AI-based modeling that can be used to design and develop intelligent mobile applications for the betterment of human life in their diverse day-today situation. This study also includes the concepts and insights of various AI-powered intelligent apps in several application domains, ranging from personalized recommendation to healthcare services, including COVID-19 pandemic management in recent days. Finally, we highlight several research issues and future directions relevant to our analysis in the area of mobile data science and intelligent apps. Overall, this paper aims to serve as a reference point and guidelines for the mobile application developers as well as the researchers in this domain, particularly from the technical point of view.

It is a widely held assumption that learning style is a useful model for quantifying user characteristics for effective personalized learning. We set out to challenge this assumption by discussing the current state of the art, in relation to quantitative evaluations of such systems and also the methodologies that should be employed in such evaluations. We present two case studies that provide rigorous and quantitative evaluations of learning-style-adapted e-learning environments. We believe that the null results of both these studies indicate a limited usefulness in terms of learning styles for user modeling and suggest that alternative characteristics or techniques might provide a more beneficial experience to users.

Ontologies and semantic web services are the basics of next generation semantic web. This upcoming technologies are useful in many fields such as bioinformatics, business collaboration, Data integration and etc. E-learning is also the field in which semantic web technologies can be used to provide dynamism in learning methodologies. E-learning includes set of tasks which may be instructional design, content development, authoring, delivery, assessment, feedback and etc. that can be sequenced and composed as workflow. Web based Learning Management Systems should concentrate on how to satisfy the e-learners requirements. In this paper we have suggested the theoretical framework ALMS-Adaptive Learning management System which focuses on three aspects 1) Extracting the knowledge from the use's interaction, behaviour and actions and translate them into semantics which are represented as Ontologies 2) Find the Learner style from the knowledge base and 3)deriving and composing the workflow depending upon the learner style. The intelligent agents are used in each module of the framework to perform reasoning and finally the personalized workflow for the e-learner has been recommended.