Project Description
If user models and personalisation processes are to be scrutable, we need tools that will enable users to easily see large user models. VlUM is a novel Visualisation that enables users to gain an overview of large user models. Originally developed to help medical students find topic areas they need to study, it evaluated in the context of movie recommendations. It was the
James Uther's thesis
which reports a comprehensive evaluation where users were randomly allocated to groups where each group did a barrage of tasks, but the different groups worked with different sized models, with 100, 300, 500 or 700 concepts.
Performance and error rates were excellent and consistent for the first three groups, with some
degradation in performance and error rate for 700 concepts.
It was the basis for SIV, which exploited light weight ontologies to structure a graph for this visualisation and enhanced the tool.
Together, these have been used in several projects, as a means to providing an overview of a large user model.
Key Publications
M. Uther and J. Kay. Learner modelling for mobile devices: from knowledge to context. In G. D. Bormida, M. Sharples, J. Attewell, and E. Murelli, editors, Proceedings of MLEARN 2004, 3rd European Conference on Mobile Learning, 2004. [View Details]
T. Apted, J. Kay, A. Lum, and J. Uther. Visualisation of ontological inferences for user control of personal web agents. In E. Banissi, K. Borner, C. Chen, G. Clapworthy, C. Maple, A. Lobben, C. Moore, J. Roberts, A. Ursyn, and J. Zhang, editors, Proceedings of IV '03, 7th International Conference on Information Visualization, pages 306-311. IEEE Computer Society (Washington, DC, USA), 2003. [View Details]
J. Kay, A. Lum, and J. Uther. How can users edit and control their models in ubiquitous computing environments? In K. Cheverst, N. de Carolis, and A. Kruger, editors, Online Proceedings of the UM (User Modeling) 2003 Workshop on User Modeling for Ubiquitous Computing, pages 12-16, 2003. [View Details]
J. Uther and J. Kay. Vlum, a web-based visualisation of large user models. In P. Brusilovsky, A. Corbett, and F. de Rosis, editors, Proceedings of UM 2003, User Modelling, pages 198-202. Springer, 2003. [View Details]
J. B. Uther, M. Uther, and J. Kay. Visualising cohort comparisons with vLum. In Proceedings of CSCL 2003, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning Conference, pages 114-116, 2003. [View Details]
J. Uther and J. Kay. Describing and viewing large user models. In ADCS'99, Australian Document Computing Symposium (Proceedings), pages 81-84, 1999. [View Details]
J. Uther and J. Kay. Compact display of large user models. In Pan-Sydney Area Visual Information Processing Workshop, VIP'98 (Proceedings), pages 60 - 64. VIP Lab, School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, 1998. [View Details]
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