People

Research activity in 2000

The activities of the Intelligent User Interfaces group concern the definition of techniques for improving the interaction between humans and computers. This activity has been coupled with a design and development activity, aimed at grounding such techniques by applying them to concrete examples.

Three main research topics can be identified: the design of agent-based architectures for the development of complex Web-based systems, the definition of personalization techniques to enhance the interaction with the user and the definition of problem-solving techniques for the resolution of complex problems.

• The main result in the agent-based architectures topic is represented by the design of a general-purpose multi-agent architecture for the development of Web-based systems offering complex functionalities, among which the personalization of the interaction with the user. This architecture represents an evolution of the SETA architecture and differs for the internal design of the system agents. In Seta2000, an agent-communication infrastructure has been developed to enable a uniform communication among heterogeneous agents, which can communicate in synchronous and asynchronous ways. This infrastructure supports the design of internal agent architectures which can behave according to different paradigms: they can offer services by method execution, in a pure Object-Oriented style, but they can also carry on internal activities in an autonomous way.
• The research in the personalization topic has produced interesting results concerning both user modeling and generation of personalized interactions. As far as user modeling is concerned, probabilistic techniques have been exploited to identify the user’s interests and requirements in a reactive way, supporting the dynamic revision of the user model. As far as the personalization of the interaction with the user, personalization rules and dynamic text generation techniques have been defined and developed to produce customized presentations "on the fly", on the basis of the user’s interests and requirements, stored in the user model.

• We have investigated the capabilities of problem solving and reasoning within an agent architecture supporting a costumer in a Web store. In particular, we have investigated the issues relevant to configuration of complex products. A complex product can be viewed as a structured entity whose subparts can be complex products in their turn or atomic ones. Each product that can only be sold "as it is", i.e. for which the customer has no way to change its internal structure, is defined atomic. Thus, eventually, a complex product can be considered as the result of an assembly of atomic ones. Each complex product can be sold in a huge number of different variants to meet the customer's requirements. Since it is impossible to list all of these variants, an intelligent system supporting the customer should be able to build "on the fly" a description of a complex product meeting the customer requirements (if any). In order to approach this goal, we defined both a language (its syntax and its semantics) to describe the products and a set of inference mechanisms working on such descriptions. Moreover, a prototype has been implemented that it able to verify that a complex meeting the customer's requirements can actually be built and to propose a configured product if it is required by the user.
• Part of the outcomes of the research topics carried on by the Intelligent User Interfaces group have been experimented in the development of the multi-agent system Seta2000: this system, described in detail later on, is a prototype system for the presentation of touristic information. Seta2000 tailors the suggestion of touristic attractions to the user’s interests and requirements, taking into account the fact that, in addition to individual users, also groups of people might want to plan a trip together. In order to handle this issue, the system maintains a model of the group of tourists and tailors the suggestions to the requirements of the possibly heterogeneous (e.g., the group might include people having extremely different requirements, such as adults, children, disabled people). The system also offers specific problem-solving functionalities to coordinate the visit to the suggested places, recommending visits during the opening times of the various places.

During 2000, the research in the above-mentioned areas has been carried on within the following projects:

CAWICOMS (Customer-Adaptive Web Interface for the Configuration of Products and Services with Multiple Suppliers) is a project founded by the European Union within the "Information Society Technology" Programme of the V Framework. It started July 1^st 2000 and will end October 31^st 2002.

The CAWICOMS project involves the following international partners: German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, GmbH (DFKI), British Telecommunications plc., ILOG SA, Siemens AG, Telecom Italia S.p.A., University of Klagenfurt , University of Torino.

Focus of this project is to enable businesses to market complex customizable products and services by the new ways of electronic commerce. CAWICOMS will develop the technology for:

• A new generation of configurators that will be able to deal simultaneously with multiple suppliers over a network; to interact with other configuration systems as well as with component catalogues; and to deal with different interaction styles and levels, depending on the customer.
• Web-based human computer interaction that will be able to identify the skill-level, preferences, and needs of the customer.

Within the CAWICOMS project, the working unity of the Dipartimento di Informatica of the University of Torino (UTO) focuses its activity on the development of personalisation strategies exploited by the CAWICOMS Frontend, in order to customise the interaction with the user of configuration systems.

Several aspects of the interaction can be personalised. For instance, the layout of the interface, the amount of information to be displayed and the type of questions asked during the configuration of the product/service. The first phase of the project will focus on the last aspect, which strongly depends on the user’s knowledge level and interests, and is critical to the usability of the configuration system. The information about the user’s interests and skills, together with the underlying domain-specific knowledge about configuration models, will be exploited to predict the user’s choices during the configuration process. The ultimate goal is to carry on the configuration process while limiting the number of questions asked to the user and avoiding questions which the user might not be able to answer. As the user interface is dynamically generated during the interaction, the level of detail addressed during the configuration process will be continuously adapted to the most recent hypotheses about her/his knowledgeability and interests, therefore gaining an extremely reactive adaptation to the user’s needs.

The generation of personalized user interfaces is performed by the CAWICOMS Frontend. The two main tasks performed by the Frontend are:

• the acquisition of the information for the configuration process (by asking the user, or by predicting suitable values, on the basis of the user’s knowledgeability and estimated preferences);
• the presentation of the (possibly partial) solutions produced by the Backend to the user.

Both tasks can be personalised by exploiting specific strategies, given the information stored in the user model. In order to do that, the Frontend has to carry on the following activities:

1. a user modeling activity, aimed to estimate the customer’s interests and knowledge level, on the basis of her/his behaviour during the interaction with the system;
2. a conversion activity, aimed to translate (back and forth) the information coming from the Backend (which reasons in terms of configuration problems) into concepts understandable to users, i.e., not strictly related to the management con constraints and configuration problems, but more related to an external (though, possibly very technical) description of the product/service to be configured;
3. a personalization activity, necessary to select the suitable interaction steps, given the problem at hand and the characteristics (expertise, interests) of the individual customer;
4. a dynamic user interface generation activity, as the information presented on the user’s screen must be integrated "on the fly", step by step during the configuration process.

Based on the estimate of the user’s properties, the Frontend selects a personalization strategy, for instance "to present only top-level features and no technical details" and generates an adequate user interface using the predefined available graphical elements. Furthermore the Frontend is able to present certain configurable options with default values, whereby these defaults correspond to the estimated interests of the current user.

The user inputs and the defaults suggested by the Frontend are handed to the Backend and the distributed problem solving mechanism is initiated. After the calculation of results – that are passed back using the generic data exchange mechanism – these results are also presented to the user in a personalized way, i.e., for instance the technical details are omitted.

The project focused on the re-design of the multi-agent architecture developed within the SETA project (see "Innovative Application of Information Technology") to build adaptive Web based systems.

The basic principles behind the design are :

• the identification of roles needed to offer the main functionalities of the system
• the definition of agents for these roles
• management of the interaction between the agents

A set of specialized agents have been defined. Each of them has a key role (for instance, the communication with the Web, page generation, etc.) and manages the related activities, using knowledge and technologies specific to the task. In particular the architecture includes:

• an agent managing the interaction with the user from a logical stand point, allowing the system to decide the next step of the interaction based on context of the previous interaction and on the user requests
• a set of specialized agents for the user modeling, the selection of information to present and the Web page generation
• some agents have inference capabilities to decompose and solve complex problems

The activity of the project involved also the definition of the internal architecture of a single agent. This architecture has been designed to allow the interaction of heterogeneous agents and includes a wrapper to allow a unified message protocol between differed kind of agents. The protocol includes synchronous, asynchronous and multicast types of messages. Moreover, the wrapper allows the agents to manage requests in parallel using the Java thread mechanism. Internally the agents can follow different paradigms: action-based or standard Java objects. The User Modeling component needs to provide user data to other agents but also has some autonomous activities to carry on such as revising the user model, during the interaction with the system: these activities should be managed independently from the other agents requests. Other agents, like the Personalisation Agent, responsible for building the personalized Web pages, should respond to requests from the browser.

A prototype for personalized tourism services on the Web has been build following the revised architecture. The system presents to the user artistic attractions as well as restaurants or other useful services. The navigation of the touristic site can be done on the basis of different criteria: information can be found geographically or searching by categories (museums, buildings, restaurants, etc.) or combining the two strategies, for example the user can search for all the Baroque buildings in Torino.

The system has reasoning capabilities since it is able to schedule the visit during a day by taking into account both the user’s choices and other constraints. In particular, the system allows the user to select and insert in the agenda a set of artistic attractions of interest and ask the system to organize the plan of the day on the basis of the selected items and other constraints the user might have (for example the starting time of the visit, morning or afternoon preferences).

This project is carried on in cooperation with CSELT; it started in September 2000 and will last until August 2001.

The main goal of this project is the definition of personalization techniques for the customization of the future television services and the exploitation of such techniques within a prototype system for the generation of personalized Electronic Program Guides (EPGs). The customization of the EPG will concern the personalized selection of the TV programs to be advertized, on the basis of the user’s interests.

The system will be based on a multi-agent architecture, where specialized agents collect data about the available TV programs, monitor the user’s behaviour to retrieve information about her/his interests and select the events to be advertised in the personalized EPG, depending on the user’s preferences at the time of day s/he wants to watch TV. The system will exploit multi-agent technologies for supporting the agent communication and it will run locally within the user’s Set Top Box, where the tasks for the management of the EPGs are executed.