Recommender Systems (RSs) are software tools and techniques providing suggestions for items to be of use to a user. In this introductory chapter we briefly discuss basic RS ideas and concepts. Our main goal is to delineate, in a coherent and structured way, the chapters included in this handbook and to help the reader navigate the extremely rich and detailed content that the handbook offers.

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Introduction to Recommender Systems Handbook

One distinctive feature of any adaptive system is the user model that represents essential information about each user This chapter complements other chapters of this book in reviewing user models and user modeling approaches applied in adaptive Web systems The presentation is structured along three dimensions: what is being modeled, how it is modeled, and how the models are maintained After a broad overview of the nature of the information presented in these various user models, the chapter focuses on two groups of approaches to user model representation and maintenance: the overlay approach to user model representation and the uncertainty-based approach to user modeling

User models for adaptive hypermedia and adaptive educational systems

The paper reviews the development of generic user modeling systems over the past twenty years. It describes their purposes, their services within user-adaptive systems, and the different design requirements for research prototypes and commercially deployed servers. It discusses the architectures that have been explored so far, namely shell systems that form part of the application, central server systems that communicate with several applications, and possible future user modeling agents that physically follow the user. Several implemented research prototypes and commercial systems are briefly described.

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Generic User Modeling Systems

Personality is a psychological construct aimed at explaining the wide variety of human behaviors in terms of a few, stable and measurable individual characteristics. In this respect, any technology involving understanding, prediction and synthesis of human behavior is likely to benefit from Personality Computing approaches, i.e. from technologies capable of dealing with human personality. This paper is a survey of such technologies and it aims at providing not only a solid knowledge base about the state-of-the-art, but also a conceptual model underlying the three main problems addressed in the literature, namely Automatic Personality Recognition (inference of the true personality of an individual from behavioral evidence), Automatic Personality Perception (inference of personality others attribute to an individual based on her observable behavior) and Automatic Personality Synthesis (generation of artificial personalities via embodied agents). Furthermore, the article highlights the issues still open in the field and identifies potential application areas.

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A Survey of Personality Computing

Social Signal Processing is the research domain aimed at bridging the social intelligence gap between humans and machines. This paper is the first survey of the domain that jointly considers its three major aspects, namely, modeling, analysis, and synthesis of social behavior. Modeling investigates laws and principles underlying social interaction, analysis explores approaches for automatic understanding of social exchanges recorded with different sensors, and synthesis studies techniques for the generation of social behavior via various forms of embodiment. For each of the above aspects, the paper includes an extensive survey of the literature, points to the most important publicly available resources, and outlines the most fundamental challenges ahead.

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Bridging the Gap between Social Animal and Unsocial Machine: A Survey of Social Signal Processing

We introduce the general user model ontology Gumo for the uniform interpretation of distributed user models in intelligent semantic web enriched environments. We discuss design decisions, show the relation to the user model markup language UserML and present the integration of ubiquitous applications with the u2m.org user model service.

Gumo: the general user model ontology

Science Fiction movies have always been a medium for speculation about the future of technology. The most visible part of technology often is its interaction design, which therefore appears prominently in these movies. This paper presents a survey of human-computer interaction designs in SciFi movies during the past decades and it relates the techniques shown there to existing technologies and prototypes in research. Different types of interaction are categorized according to their application domain in real life and compared to current research in human-computer interaction.

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A survey of human-computer interaction design in science fiction movies

This study explores how features of brand personalities can b e modelled with the prosodic parameters pitch level, pitch range, articulation rate and loudness. Experiments with parametric al diphone synthesis showed that listeners rated the prosodically changed versions better than a baseline version for the dimen- sions "sincerity", "competence", "sophistication", "excitem ent" and "ruggedness". The contribution of prosodic features such as lower pitch and an enlarged pitch range are analyzed and discussed.

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Modelling personality features by changing prosody in synthetic speech

As part of our work on anthropomorphic and zoomorphic interfaces for physical, interactive objects we have conducted an exhaustive literature review spanning the disciplines of anthropomorphism, affective computing, tangible interaction and industrial design, aggregating relevant research to inform our efforts. In this paper we summarise the results by deriving concepts and design guidelines for the realisation of life-like, tangible objects, with which we also aim at fostering discussions and a scientific exchange in this highly interdisciplinary field.

Concepts for life-like interactive objects

We introduce the general user model ontology GUMO for the uniform interpretation of distributed user models in intelligent semantic web enriched environments. We discuss design decisions, show the relation to the user model markup language USERML and present the integration of ubiquitous applications with the u2m.org user model service.

Michael Schmitz

Papers

Gumo: the general user model ontology

A survey of human-computer interaction design in science fiction movies

Modelling personality features by changing prosody in synthetic speech

Concepts for life-like interactive objects

GUMO : the general user model ontology