Personalized Television Services

This project is carried on in cooperation with Telecom Italia Lab (former 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 concerns the personalized selection of the TV programs to be advertized, on the basis of the user's interests.

The system, currently under development, is based on a multi-agent architecture, where specialized agents collect data about the available TV programs, monitor the user's behavior 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 exploits multi-agent technologies for supporting the agent communication and it runs locally within the user's Set Top Box, where the tasks for the management of the EPGs are executed.

Relevant papers:

• L. Ardissono, F. Portis, P. Torasso, F. Bellifemine, A. Chiarotto, A. Difino, "Architecture of a system for the generation of personalized Electronic Program Guides", Proc. UM2001 Workshop on Personalization in Future TV (TV'01), Sonthofen, Germany, July 2001 [PDF]

• C. Gena, "Designing TV Viewer Stereotypes for an Electronic Program Guide", Proc. 8th Conference on User Modeling (UM2001), Sonthofen, Germany, July 2001 [PDF]

• C. Gena and L. Ardissono, "On the Construction of TV Viewer Stereotypes Starting from Lifestyles Surveys", Proc. UM2001 Workshop on Personalization in Future TV, Sonthofen, Germany, July 2001 [PDF]

For more information about this project, please contact
Liliana Ardissono, or Cristina Gena