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Message from the Tutorial Chair
Dear Conference Attendees,
After careful selection and kind contribution from experts of our field, I am delighted to offer you three high-quality and exciting full-day tutorials. We highly encourage both junior and senior researchers to attend these tutorials. Especially, we have significantly lowered the tutorial fees to make them affordable to everyone who registers for the conference. For more information on the tutorials, please read on.
I look forward to seeing you at IUI 2007 in Hawaii!
Pearl Pu
Tutorial Chair
T1: Building Ubiquitous and Robust Speech and Natural Language Interfaces
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Gary Geunbae Lee
Professor
Isoft Lab, POSTECH
Pohang, Korea |
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Shimei Pan
Research Scientist
IBM T. J Watson Research Center
Hawthorne, NY USA |
Benefits
Attendees will come away with an in-depth understanding of principles and technologies that can be used in building robust and ubiquitous speech and natural language interfaces including spoken dialog systems, speech-to-speech translation systems and intelligent chatting systems
Origins
New for IUI 2007
Features
The full day tutorial consists of the following two parts.
1st half day (morning): Technologies for ubiquitous speech and natural language user interfaces
- Introduction to ubiquitous spoken dialog systems
- Automatic speech recognition and post-processing
- Spoken language understanding and dialog management
- Clarification dialog and dialog development studio
- Intelligent chatting and speech-to-speech translation
- Summary of ubiquitous spoken dialog systems
2nd half day (afternoon): Building robust speech and natural language user interfaces
- Analyses of problems in speech and natural language user interfaces
- Typical error detection strategies
- Typical error recovery strategies
- Multimodal error correction
- Adaptive speech and natural language interfaces
- Summary of design principles
Audience
Researchers, students, designers and application developers who wish to incorporate natural language interactions and dialog techniques in their systems.
Presentation
Lecture and demonstration
Instructors
Gary Geunbae Lee has been a professor at CSE department, POSTECH in Korea since 1991. He is a director of Intelligent Software (ISoft) Laboratory which focuses on human language technology researches including natural language processing, speech recognition/synthesis, speech translation, question answering and web/text mining. Professor Lee authored more than 100 papers in international journals and conferences, and has served as a technical committee member and reviewer for several international conferences such as ACL, COLING, IJCAI, ACM SIGIR, AIRS, ACM IUI, Interspeech-ICSLP/EUROSPEECH, EMNLP and IJCNLP. He is currently leading several national and industry projects for robust spoken dialog systems, spoken dialog translation and expressive TTS. Professor Lee holds a Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA, and BS/MS in computer engineering from Seoul National University.
Shimei Pan has been a research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York since 2000. She is a member of the Intelligent Multimedia Interaction Department, which focuses on developing natural language and graphics interaction technologies to facilitate robust and effective human-computer interactions. Currently, she is working on developing new methods that can improve the robustness and usability of practical conversation systems. Previously, she has been working on case-based natural language generation, intelligent navigation for conversation management, prosody modeling for spoken utterance generation, user preference modeling, and multimedia coordination and synchronization for multimedia presentation generation. She holds a PhD in computer science from Columbia University.
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T2: Advanced Topics in Recommendation
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Anthony Jameson
Principal Researcher
DFKI, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence
Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3
66123 Saarbrücken
Germany
http://dfki.de/~jameson/ |
Benefits
Attendees will come away with an up-to-date, active understanding of a representative set of current developments in recommender systems that will help them to conduct cutting-edge research and/or to work more effectively with the currently widespread recommendation technology.
Origins
The instructors have previously (co-)presented tutorials on recommender systems in the IUI, CHI, IJCAI, AAAI, EC, CSCW, and UM conference series. But the material in this tutorial is largely new, because of the focus on advanced topics from recent and current research.
Features
Recommender systems have been one of the most successful forms of intelligent user interface. Despite the widespread commercial deployment of now-familiar, relatively lightweight forms of recommendation, researchers have been exploring new paradigms and issues that should allow recommendation to be applied in new application settings and with increasing user acceptance.
We will begin with a brief recapitulation of well-known concepts and techniques, so that even IUI 2007 attendees who have little prior familiarity with recommender systems will be able to understand the rest of the tutorial. About 4/5 of the tutorial will be devoted to a selection of advanced topics that seem likely to take on increasing importance in research and practice in the near future, such as the following topics:
- Recommendation for groups of users: When a recommendation is generated not for an individual but for a group of persons that will act on the recommendation together, the recommendation problem takes on new dimensions.
- Recommenders and the social web: The social web is changing our thinking about the Internet: no longer just a place to read and write, it is becoming a place to meet, chat, argue, discuss, confess, and befriend. We will examine the ways recommenders are helping to create and nurture the social web.
- Recommendations of coherent sets of items: Often a user will be most interested in recommendations that span a space, rather than a narrow set of recommendations all of the same type. For instance, recommending a set of technical papers all by the same author may be less interesting than recommending a range of interesting papers. Recommender algorithms must be extended to incorporate a notion of the separation among items in a set.
- Recommendations concerning sequences of actions: In some settings it is natural to recommend actions that together will form a sequence (e.g., visits to stores in a shopping center), where the choice of the later actions will depend on the results of the actions earlier in the sequence (e.g., whether a desired product was found in the first store visited). This paradigm requires different recommendation techniques and raises new interface design issues.
- Question-asking in recommenders: How can recommenders discover a sequence of questions to help a user select an item that fits his or her needs? In many applications the user will not be aware of the sets of available options or of the mapping between the options and user needs. The recommender can help the user explore the item space with appropriate questions based on the answers to previous questions.
- Exploitation of the user’s episodic memory: The increasing technological possibilities for automatically capturing a user’s actions and experiences (e.g., prior encounters with relevant products in various settings) increases the range of data that can be used for recommendation, as well as the variety of ways in which recommendations can be presented (e.g., in conjunction with reminders of past experiences).
- Security and recommenders: How do recommenders relate to security and privacy? What can be done to protect recommenders from malicious or accidental attack?
Audience
Researchers, students, designers, and application developers who are working to improve recommendation technology and/or the associated user interfaces. In particular, even participants who do not conduct advanced recommender research themselves should be able to benefit from a better understanding of the alternatives to current technologies and application settings.
Presentation
Each topic will be introduced and motivated with examples from recent research and/or practice. The new recommendation methods will be presented and discussed critically, and open issues will be identified.
Because this is a full-day tutorial, enough time will be allocated to each topic to allow interactive discussion with the participants as well as the inclusion of some brief exercises designed to ensure active understanding.
Instructors
John Riedl has been a member of the faculty of the Computer Science department of the University of Minnesota since March 1990. In 1992 he co-founded the GroupLens Research project on collaborative information filtering, and has been co-directing it since. In 1996 he co-founded Net Perceptions to commercialize GroupLens. Net Perceptions was the leading recommender systems company during the Internet boom. In 1999, John and other Net Perceptions’ co-founders shared the MIT Sloan School’s award for E-Commerce Technology. Recently, GroupLens Research has been exploring the ways in which recommender systems can be used to study and enhance social structures, such as conversation systems. Can the recommender help members understand their connections to the group in deeper ways? How about each member’s unique contributions to the group? Or, the value of a member’s contribution to the success of the group as a whole?
Anthony Jameson is a principal researcher at DFKI (the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) and adjunct professor of computer science at the International University in Germany. Since the 1980s, he has been among the first researchers to work on various paradigms in recommendation, including conversational recommendation, recommendation based on multiattribute utility theory, probabilistic estimation of users’ evaluation criteria, recommendation of sequences of actions, and the integration of recommending and reminding. He has also published widely on other topics in intelligent user interfaces, including systems that adapt to their users and natural language dialog systems.
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T3: Designing Intelligent User Interface for Ubiquitous Computing Environments
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Antonio Krüger
Associate professor for Geoinformatics and Computer Science
University of Münster Germany
kruegera@uni-muenster.de |
Abstract
This full-day tutorial will provide an overview on Intelligent User Interfaces in the context of the technological development associated with the Ubiquitous Computing paradigm. Based on a technological assessment of the main technological areas involved (miniaturization, communication and network structures, advanced display and speech technologies, as well as sensor integration and deployment) this tutorial will discuss the main approaches in context and user modeling, as well as present new interaction paradigms for ubiquitous computing environments. Examples of past and current research projects of the field will be used to explain and discuss the intersection of Ubiquitous Computing and Intelligent User Interfaces. Having discussed the technical foundations, the tutorial aims to explore the design and development of new pervasive applications for mobile devices and other distributed interfaces. It will explore how handhelds can interact with other surrounding devices, intelligent environments and with the social context. The tutorial will also look at how innovative ethno-methodologies such as living labs, on-the-field data collection, enactments, 'Cultural Probes', Participatory Design approaches and advanced in-situ evaluation techniques can lead to the creation and representation of feasible and relevant future communications scenarios.
Target Audience
The tutorial aims at graduate students, teachers and professionals that would like to obtain an overview on the major technological developments in the area of Ubiquitous Computing and the major challenges for the design and the development of Intelligent User Interfaces
Structure
This will be a full-day tutorial (2 x 3 hrs) structured into six sessions of one hour each. Session one will discuss the technological trends and developments in the area of Ubiquitous Computing, session two will introduce the major approaches to model contexts and users for adaptive systems in instrumented environments, session three will provide an overview on past and current research projects in the area, session four will be an introduction to the value of participatory design in ubicomp, session five will discuss the user experience implications of the physical and social contexts in scenarios of intelligent networked interfaces and the sixth session will focus on understanding how innovative ethno-methodologies and other advanced in-situ evaluation techniques can be useful for the identification of ‘soft-data’ requirements (such as emotions and feelings) leading to the design and assessment of feasible and relevant future communications scenarios.
Instructors
Dr. Anxo Cereijo Roibás is Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, Visiting Lecturer at Westminster University, at the Politecnico di Milano and the National Institute of Design (India). His expertise resides in the user experience in pervasive communication systems. He has been HCI Manager at the Mobile Internet Services Provider, HiuGO SpA, and User Experience Consultant for Vodafone and since 2000, he has been collaborating with the Nokia Research Center. He has coordinated European funded projects such as the TRAIN-IT, European Union - Canada Program for Cooperation in Higher Education and Training. He has coordinated an ethnographic research addressing the future use of mobile phones as multimedia tools in collaboration with the Vodafone Group Foundation and the British Royal Academic of Engineering. He is British Telecom Fellow at the BT IT Mobility Research Centre and Executive Committee member of the British HCI Group.
Antonio Krueger is an associate professor for Geoinformatics and Computer Science at Münster University, Germany and the managing director of the Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi) at the same University. Antonio is also a co-founder of Eyeled GmbH, a company focusing on mobile computing solutions, such as the annual mobile fair guide for CeBIT. Antonio's main research areas include Intelligent User Interfaces and Mobile Context-aware Systems. He worked on the automatic generation of graphics for technical documentations, intelligent navigation systems and personalized media generation. In this context he looked at generation processes that take into account both the limited technical resources of output devices and the limited cognitive resources of the users. He co-organizes the annual Smart-Graphics Symposium and served on various program committees in the field of intelligent mobile systems and instrumented environments, e.g. the international conferences on Intelligent User Interfaces, User Modeling, Ubiquitous, and Pervasive Computing.
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