Link

Daniel Billsus AdaptiveInfo in Irvine, CA
Clifford A. Brunk AdaptiveInfo in Irvine, CA
Craig Evans AdaptiveInfo in Irvine, CA
Brian Gladish AdaptiveInfo in Irvine, CA
Michael Pazzani AdaptiveInfo in Irvine, CA and University of California, Irvine

Communications of the ACM archive
Volume 45 , Issue 5 (May 2002)
The Adaptive Web
SPECIAL ISSUE: The adaptive web
Pages: 34 - 38
Year of Publication: 2002
ISSN:0001-0782

Excerpt of Introduction: [...]Consumers and businesses have access to vast stores of information. All this information, however, used to be accessible only while users were tethered to a computer at home or in an office. Wireless data and voice access to this vast store allows unprecedented access to information from any location at any time.

The presentation of this information must be tailored to the constraints of mobile devices [3]. Although browsing and searching are the acceptable methods of locating information on the wired Web, those operations soon become cumbersome and inefficient in the wireless setting and nearly impossible in voice interfaces. Small screens, slower connections, high latency, limited input capabilities, and the serial nature of voice interfaces present new challenges. Agents that select information for the user [9] are a convenience when displaying information on a 19-inch desktop monitor accessed over a broadband connection; they are essential on a handheld wireless device. To give one real-world example, the Los Angeles Times Web site contains approximately 1,000 current news articles at any point in time, 10,000 local restaurant listings, and 100,000 classified advertisements, whereas somewhere between three and nine headlines, restaurant names, or summaries fit on the screen of a wireless device. Adaptive personalization technology that makes all of this information available to the mobile user is discussed here. The goal of adaptive personalization is to increase the usage and acceptance of mobile access through content that is easily accessible and personally relevant.

My Discussion:
This paper takes all the problems of mobile connected User Interfaces seriously. The resulting paradigm for presenting information is still very browsing oriented, but that is not surprising for a system that tries to tailor the website of the Los Angelese Times to a mobile format. The paper first makes a case for adaption of content to the mobile screen, and then for automated adaptation since having the user input what the user wants is actually difficult on a mboile device or complicated on a large device. The authors do not want to have the user have to hold a meta-conversation with the site about what the user wants to read, but wants the user's browsing behavior to be that meta conversation, and have the site tailor itself to what the user might want with every key-click. There's no explicit modelling of the user, all the refernces are to mathematical techniques like bayesian and collaborative methods, while keeping in mind the facts that user's tastes change, and that users should not be completly locked in to what the computer thinks their niche is, i.e. always make it easy to go back to general content. The paper finishes with how the browsing experience is changed for the better on several fronts, but have only data about the news portal to indicate the adaptation to the user was perceived as beneficial.