Invited talk

Dr. Ernesto William De Luca
Personalization and context-awareness in Retrieval and Recommender Systems

Context-aware information is widely available in various ways such as interaction patterns, location, devices, annotations, query suggestions and user profiles and is becoming more and more important for enhancing retrieval performance and recommendation results. At the moment, the main issue to cope with is not only recommending or retrieving the most relevant items and content, but defining them ad hoc. Further relevant issues are personalizing and adapting the information and the way it is displayed to the user’s current situation (device, location) and interests.
In this talk I will discuss how personalization and contextual information can be integrated in retrieval and recommendation systems. Two main issues are recognized: a general content context and a user-centric content context. A general content context is a common case defined by time, weather, location and many similar other aspects. A user-centric content context is given by the content of user profiles such as language, interests, devices used for interaction, etc. The inclusion of these two contexts in information systems can help in delivering better structured results that can be personalized and better match the user needs and expectation. Results of such integration will be shown and discussed.

Biographical Sketch

Dr. Ernesto William De Luca is Head of the Competence Center for Information Retrieval and Machine Learning at the DAI-Lab, Berlin Institute of Technology, Germany. His research areas include Semantic Web technologies, Recommender Systems and Information Retrieval. He has authored more than 50 papers on national and international conferences, books and journals in these fields. He has organized a large number of workshops and served as programme committee member at top level conferences. At the moment, he is co-organizing the 2nd Semantic Personalized Information Management (SPIM 2011) Workshop at the 10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011) and the 2nd Challenge on Context-aware Movie Recommendation (CAMRa2010) at the 5th ACM Recommender Systems 2011 Conference (RecSys2011).