KMi Seminars
From Web Personalisation to Collective Intelligence
This event took place on Monday 14 September 2009 at 12:30

 
Dr Nikolaos Nanas Centre for Research and Technology - Thessaly (CERETETH, Greece)

The rate at which new media technologies impact on our lives is accelerating. Broadcast media (such as TV and radio) are less than a century old but we cannot imagine a world without them. The Web, and specifically, Web 2.0, has brought about a radical alternative to traditional broadcasting models, since nowadays everyone can be a digital transmitter. This development has a huge potential to unleash far-reaching (social) impact and connect people in unprecedented ways.

The current state of the Web as media has inherent problems of sustainability. Freedom of choice from an enormous variety of information sources makes it harder for people to spot interesting and valuable information. It is just impossible to keep up with the gigabytes of information that can be delivered to one's PCs, mobile phones, or other networked devices, or to guard effectively against spam or unwanted communication. On the other hand, as an individual publisher, there is currently no way to ensure that once broadcasted, one's ideas or opinions will reach the right audience.

The missing, critical ingredient is personalisation, i.e., the tailoring of media to the interests, the needs, the demographic and the geographic characteristics of individual users and user communities. The presentation will focus on ongoing work to develop and apply adaptive, biologically-inspired profiling models that can support a variety of personalisation services on the web. A series of prototype web applications will be demonstrated and future plans on applying such technologies for augmenting the collective intelligence of Web communities will be discussed.

 
KMi Seminars
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities