Held in Conjunction with the
Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence


Overview

The intense competition among Internet-based businesses to acquire new customers and retain the existing ones has made Web personalization an indispensable part of e-commerce. Web personalization can be defined as any action that tailors the Web experience to a particular user, or set of users. The experience can be something as casual as browsing a Web site or as (economically) significant as trading stocks or purchasing a car. The actions can range from simply making the presentation more pleasing to anticipating the needs of a user and providing customized and relevant information. To achieve effective personalization, organizations must rely on all available data, including the usage and click-stream data, the site content, the site structure, as well as user demographics and profiles. In addition, efficient and intelligent techniques are needed to mine this data for actionable knowledge, and to effectively use the discovered knowledge to enhance the users' Web experience. These techniques must address important challenges emanating from the size and the heterogeneous nature of the data itself, as well as the dynamic nature of user interactions with Web sites, especially in e-commerce applications. These challenges include the scalability of the personalization solutions, data integration, and successful integration of techniques from machine learning, information retrieval and filtering, databases, data mining, text mining, statistics, and human-computer interaction.

Throughout the history of the Web, AI has continued to play an essential role in the development of Web-based information systems, and now it is believed that e-commerce and specifically personalisation will prove to be the "killer-app" for AI. E-commerce is a rich source of difficult problems and challenges for AI researchers. This workshop intends to bring together researchers and practitioners to foster an exchange of information and ideas, and to facilitate a discussion of current and emerging topics related to Web Intelligence. Web Intelligence exploits AI and advanced information technology on the Web and Internet, in order to gain business intelligence and to assist users. The goal of the workshop is to stimulate the future development of new models, methodologies, and tools for Web intelligence, including effective and scalable Web-based personalization solutions and recommender systems.

Topics
The following are some of the issues and topics that will be addressed at the workshop:

Data and Knowledge Modelling, Integration and Management

  • Data models for Web usage, content, and structure data
  • Integration of content, structure and usage data for personalization
  • Techniques for improving online data quality
  • The role of cross channel data in online personalisation
  • Knowledge representation issues

Architectures and Systems

  • Scalable collaborative filtering techniques
  • Effective techniques for personalization based on anonymous data
  • Agents for intelligent browsing and navigation
  • Automated techniques for generation and updating of user profiles
  • Cognitive models for Web navigation and e-commerce interactions
  • Metrics for Personalisation Effectiveness
Important Dates
Abstract Submission: 19 February, 2001
Paper Submission: 26 February, 2001
Notification of Acceptance: 30 March, 2001
Camera Ready Papers Due: 25 April, 2001
Worksop Date: 4 August, 2001

Note: A selected number of the workshop accepted papers will be expanded and revised for possible inclusion in "Knowledge and Information Systems: An International Journal" by Springer-Verlag.

Workshop Organising Committee
Sarabjot Singh Anand
MINEit Software
sarab@mineit.com

Bamshad Mobasher
DePaul University
mobasher@cs.depaul.edu

List of Accepted Papers
Workshop Program Committee
Alex Büchner, NIKEL, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, UK
Robert Cooley, GroupFire, Inc., USA
Asuman Dogac, METU, Turkey
C. Lee Giles, NEC Research Institute, USAM
Mark Levene, University College, London, UK
Jiming Liu, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Dunja Mladenic, Josef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Maurice Mulvenna, MINEit Software, Northern Ireland, UK
Enric Plaza, Institut d'Investigació en Intel.ligència Artificial, Spain
John Riedl, Net Perceptions, USA
Barry Smyth, Changing Words Ltd, Ireland
Myra Spiliopoulou, Computer Science, Univ. Magdeburg, Germany
Jaideep Srivastava, Yodlee.com, USA
Said Tabet, Nisus, Inc
Alex Tuzhilin, Stern School of Business, New York University, USA
Ning Zhong, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan

Workshop Schedule

9:00 - 9:15: Welcome and Administration


9:15 - 10:30: Technical Session I (Data Modeling, Integration and Management)


  • Modeling Users' Navigation History
    Ernesto Damiani

  • Clustering Navigation Patterns On A Website Using A Sequence
    Alignment Method
    Birgit Hay, Geert Wets and Koen Vanhoof

  • Passive Profiling from Server Logs in an Online Recruitment
    Environment
    Rachael Rafter, Barry Smyth


10:30 - 11:00: Coffee Break


11:00 - 12:40: Technical Session II (Enabling Technologies)

  • Improving the Effectiveness of Collaborative Filtering on Anonymous
    Web Usage Data
    Bamshad Mobasher, Honghua Dai, Tao Luo, Miki Nakagawa

  • Extending Recommender Systems: A Multidimensional Approach
    Gediminas Adomavicius and Alexander Tuzhilin

  • Web Site Personalizers for Mobile Devices
    Corin R. Anderson, Pedro Domingos, Daniel S. Weld

  • Automated Query Generation For Embedded Information Retrieval
    Vladimir A. Kulyukin


12:40 - 2:00: Lunch


2:00 - 2:40: Invited Talk

  • "Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalisation"
    Dan O'Leary, University of Southern California


2:40 - 3:30: Discussion on "AI in Personalization: Challenges and Emerging Trends"

3:30 - 4:00: Coffee Break

4:00 - 5:15: Technical Session III (Architectures and Systems)

  • A Flexible Architecture for Adaptive Hypermedia Systems
    Mario Cannataro and Andrea Pugliese

  • FOCI: A Personalized Web Intelligence System
    Ah-Hwee Tan, Hwee-Leng Ong, Hong Pan, Jamie Ng, Qiu-Xiang Li

  • MOVIES2GO - A New Approach To Online Movie Recommendation
    Rajatish Mukherjee, Partha Sarathi Dutta, and Sandip Sen


5:15: Close Workshop