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.

Watch the webcast replay >>