"Personalization and Privacy in Web-based Systems"

6/6/2003: 10:30am - 12:00pm
11th Floor Large Conference Room

Abstract: User-adaptive (or "personalized") systems on the web cater their interaction to each individual user and provide benefits to both users and web vendors. These systems pose privacy problems though since they must collect large amounts of personal information to be able to adapt to users, and often do this in a rather inconspicuous manner. Privacy is therefore an important issue for personalized systems, and two different approaches are possible to address them. In one approach, privacy policies are individually negotiated, publicly promised, or regulated in privacy laws. The other approach allows users to remain anonymous with regard to the personalized system and the whole network infrastructure, whilst enabling the system to still recognize the same user across different sessions so that it can cater to her individually. This talk discusses both directions and presents prototypical solutions.

About Alfred Kobsa: Alfred Kobsa is a Professor in the School of Information and Computer Science of the University of California, Irvine. Before he was a Director of the Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD). His research lies in the areas of user modeling and personalized systems (with applications in the areas of information environments, expert finders, and user interfaces for disabled and elderly people), privacy, and in information visualization. He is the editor of User Modeling and User-Adapted Inter action, editorial board member of World-Wide Web, Universal Access in the Information Society and Information Technology and Decision Making, and was the founding president of User Modeling Inc. Dr. Kobsa edited several books and authored numerous publications in the areas of user-adaptive systems, human-computer interaction and knowledge representation. He also co-founded a national workshop series and an international conference series in these areas.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006