User modeling

About: User modeling is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10701 publications have been published within this topic receiving 278012 citations.

Effects of user similarity in social media

Abstract: There are many settings in which users of a social media application provide evaluations of one another. In a variety of domains, mechanisms for evaluation allow one user to say whether he or she trusts another user, or likes the content they produced, or wants to confer special levels of authority or responsibility on them. Earlier work has studied how the relative status between two users - that is, their comparative levels of status in the group - affects the types of evaluations that one user gives to another.Here we study how similarity in the characteristics of two users can affect the evaluation one user provides of another. We analyze this issue under a range of natural similarity measures, showing how the interaction of similarity and status can produce strong effects. Among other consequences, we find that evaluations are less status-driven when users are more similar to each other; and we use effects based on similarity to provide a plausible mechanism for a complex phenomenon observed in studies of user evaluation, that evaluations are particularly low among users of roughly equal status.Our work has natural applications to the prediction of evaluation outcomes based on user characteristics, and the use of similarity information makes possible a novel application that we introduce here - to estimate the chance of a favorable overall evaluation from a group knowing only the attributes of the group's members, but not their expressed opinions.

samap: An user-oriented adaptive system for planning tourist visits

Abstract: In this paper, we present samap, whose goal is to build a software tool to help different people visit different cities. This tool integrates modules that dynamically capture user models, determine lists of activities that can provide more utility to a user given the past experience of the system with similar users, and generates plans that can be executed by the user. This system is intended to work in portable devices (mobile phones, PDAs, etc.,) with internet connection. In this paper, we describe the architecture, the knowledge model that is shared among components using an ontology, and the three components of the tool: user module, case-based module and planning module.

Modeling user posting behavior on social media

Abstract: User generated content is the basic element of social media websites. Relatively few studies have systematically analyzed the motivation to create and share content, especially from the perspective of a common user. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive analysis of user posting behavior on a popular social media website, Twitter. Specifically, we assume that user behavior is mainly influenced by three factors: breaking news, posts from social friends and user's intrinsic interest, and propose a mixture latent topic model to combine all these factors. We evaluated our model on a large-scale Twitter dataset from three different perspectives: the perplexity of held-out content, the performance of predicting retweets and the quality of generated latent topics. The results were encouraging, our model clearly outperformed its competitors.

USIXML: A User Interface Description Language for Context-Sensitive User Interfaces

Abstract: This paper presents USIXML (USer Interface eXtensible Markup Language), a User Interface Description Language aimed at de-scribing user interfaces with various levels of details and abstrac-tions, depending on the context of use. USIXML supports a fam-ily of user interfaces such as, but not limited to: device-independent, platform-independent, modality independent, and ul-timately context-independent. This paper consequently details how context-sensitive user interfaces may be specified and pro-duced from the USIXML specifications. USIXML allows specify-ing multiple models involved in user interface design such as: task, domain, presentation, dialog, and context of use, which is in turn decomposed into user, platform, and environment. These models are structured according to the four layers of the Came-leon framework: task & concepts, abstract user interface, concrete user interface, and final user interface. To support relationships between these models, a model for inter-model mapping is also introduced that cover forward and reverse engineering as well as translation from one context of use to another.

System and method for authentication of users and communications received from computer systems

Abstract: A system and method allows a user to authenticate a communication from a computer system, a computer system to authenticate a user, or both. When a user requests a web page from the web site, customization information that is recognizable to the user is provided to allow the user to authenticate the web site. A signed, encrypted persistent file stored on the user's computer system or installed on a different computer system, or a trusted computing subsystem allows the web site to authenticate the user. If the user is using a system that will not allow that user to be authenticated, the user may instruct the system to continue providing information without the user's customization information. The system and method may be used to allow the user to authenticate an e-mail message or its source, and Flash movies or other computer code may be used if the user's e-mail client does not employ cookies.