Tutorial 1 - CANCELLED

Adaptive and Context-Sensitive Information Retrieval Systems

Joemon M Jose
University of Glasgow
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~jj/

Information Retrieval systems and tools are playing an unavoidable part in our day to day life. Most people encounter these tools in the form of web search engines, desk-top search engine, email search or as retrieval tools on digital libraries. A number of factors affect the effectiveness of such tools.

Recently, the importance of adaptive and context sensitive retrieval approaches have been emphasised. Adaptation means tailoring the retrieval according to the user needs and context. The purpose of this tutorial is to familiarise the participants with this important practical and research area.

This tutorial covers an overview of information retrieval concepts with particular emphasis on interactivity. Further it elaborates on the role of adaptively and context sensitivity with the discussion of theoretical issues and also with the description of case studies. In addition, we will discuss the evaluation methodology in information retrieval again emphasising techniques for the evaluation of the adaptive and context-sensitive systems.

Tutor Biography

Joemon Jose is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. He holds post-graduate degrees in Statistics, in Software systems and a PhD degree in Information Retrieval. He has been an active researcher in information retrieval since 1993 and has authored more than 70 journal and conference articles. He is the principal investigator for many externally funded projects on information retrieval, multimedia retrieval, multimodal interaction and adaptive information retrieval. He currently directs a team of 12 researchers on topics related to adaptive and context sensitive information retrieval.

Tutorial 2 - CANCELLED

Semantic Web for Computer and Users?

Martin Dzbor
Knowledge Media Institute Open University - UK
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/dzbor/enter.html

Marja-Riitta Koivunen
Annotea and W3C

When skilfully used, Semantic Web technologies can support user experience in many ways. They provide standards for applications for metadata creation; they support metadata integration and make it easy to create connections between metadata from different contexts, services, and user communities. They can also be used to easily extend existing metadata and support extensions to tools. However, the use of Semantic Web technologies does not guarantee good user experience, and vice-versa, good user experience does not mean that machine-oriented formalisms of the Semantic Web shall be avoided at all costs. In this tutorial show the benefits and the pitfalls of using the Semantic Web technologies as a basis for knowledge-intensive user interaction (UI) with the tools. We explore the existing relationships between IUI and Semantic Web – highlighting areas where the two successfully meet. Then we discuss design practices and approaches that are relevant to designing UI for the Semantic Web content and to using Semantic Web formalisms as drivers of UI adaptation and customization.

Tutors Biography

Martin Dzbor
Dr Dzbor is a Research Fellow at Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), The Open University since 2002, and also a technical lead of the work investigating the challenges of human-ontology interaction in the context of the flagship European project to develop tools and infrastructure for the next generation semantically aware applications – NeOn: Lifecycle Support for Networked Ontologies. He is also the author of one of the first web browser extensions that embedded semantics into standard web browsing experience. Together with his PhD students Dr Dzbor is active in the area of developing novel user interfaces (e.g. semantic web browsing and contextual visualization) and embedding novel interactive aspects into familiar tasks (e.g. trust, recommendations and reviewing).

Dr Dzbor authored five journal papers and more than twenty conference publications primarily in the domain of semantic web, e-learning, design support, and user-based application evaluation and analysis. Dr Dzbor is a member of W3C Interest Group on Semantic Web Education and Outreach and in the past delivered seminars and tutorials e.g. at the European Semantic Web Conference (UserSWeb:End User Aspects of the Semantic Web), for the UK’s Society of Archivists (Semantic Web: To be browsed or what?) and the Annual Czech and Slovak Conference on Knowledge Mgt – Znalosti 2006 (Evolution of the idea of the Semantic Web and its implications on practice).

Marja-Ritta Koivunen
Dr Koivunen has MSc from Helsinki University of Technology, Department of Technical Physics (Software Engineering and Biophysics), Tech Lic.and PhD (D.Tech) in Computer Science (the first PhD thesis in Finland concerning usability). In her career she was interested in user interfaces and usability and pioneered teaching human-computer interaction, starting a usability research group, networking with universities teaching Arts and Cognitive Psychology, educating Finnish companies, developing usability testing in Helsinki University of Technology as an Assistant Professor. She started the first Finnish usability laboratory.

In 1997 Ms. Koivunen took leave of absence to visit Helsinki Telephone Corporation and do research in the area of usability in information society helping to develop new services to Web, e.g. Infocities for Helsinki City services, Virtual Language School, 3D Digital Meeting Place called Underground Helsinki and Helsinki Arena 2000.

In 1998-2004 Ms. Koivunen has worked as W3C Fellow and a Research Scientist at the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) in MIT in the Web Accessibility and the Semantic Web research areas. Soon after her arrival to W3C she initiated an annotation project for Web based annotations called Annotea, which has been the essential part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity. Since 2004 she extends Annotea focusing on shared, social bookmarks as an Open Source project. She also does research and consulting related to usability, user experience, and Web technologies.