Combining User Profiling and Context Modelling to Provide Advanced Adaptivity and Personalization

信息系统普遍存在于日常生活活动中，过去的研究表明，使这类系统更具适应性和个性化，使它们能够自动考虑用户的当前情况、特征和偏好，这在使这些系统更有效和更容易使用方面具有很大潜力。我的长期研究计划专注于推进用户自适应系统，特别是学习系统的研究，旨在使此类系统更具适应性、智能化和个性化。自适应和个性化学习系统的研究主要集中在设计和评估独立的学习系统，这些系统大多被用作研究原型，只考虑学习者个人特征的一个或几个方面(例如，认知能力、动机方面等)。除了学习者档案中的信息之外，如今，由于移动技术的最新进步，学习者学习的环境/情景变得越来越重要，这使得学习者可以随时随地使用不同的设备进行学习，例如手机和平板电脑。因此，自适应系统研究领域中的一个开放挑战不仅是将学习者档案的多个方面结合起来，而且还将来自学习者档案的信息与来自学习者上下文/情境的信息结合起来，以便提供丰富和全面的适应性。此外，另一个挑战是设计可大规模使用的适应性系统/机制，例如用于整个教育机构。该研究计划的主要目标是通过设计和评估机制和算法(作为开源工具套件的Web服务实现)来推进用户自适应系统的研究，这些机制和算法考虑了学习者个人资料中的信息和上下文信息，并分别扩展了现有的学习系统，使其具有自适应和智能能力。开发的工具套件将对能够将Web服务集成到他们的研究原型中的研究人员和能够在他们的学习系统中使用它们的从业者都非常有用，从而为加拿大的研究和教育带来深远的好处。

Information systems are prevalent in daily life activities, and past research showed that making such systems more adaptive and personalized in terms of enabling them to automatically consider users' current situations, characteristics and preferences has high potential in making these systems more effective and easier to use. My long-term research program focuses on advancing research in user adaptive systems, especially learning systems, with the aim to make such systems more adaptive, intelligent and personalized. Research on adaptive and personalized learning systems has focused on designing and evaluating stand-alone learning systems, mostly used as research prototypes, which consider only one or few aspects of a learner's profile (e.g., cognitive abilities, motivational aspects, etc.). Besides the information in a learner profile, nowadays the context/situation in which a learner learns becomes more and more important due to the recent advances in mobile technologies, which allow learners to learn anywhere and anytime using different devices such as mobile phones and tablets. An open challenge in the research area of adaptive systems is therefore not only to combine multiple aspects of a learner profile but also to combine information from the learner profile with information from the learner's context/situation in order to provide rich and comprehensive adaptivity. Furthermore, another challenge is to design adaptive systems/mechanisms that can be used in large-scale, such as for entire educational institutions. The primary goal of this research program is to advance research in user adaptive systems through designing and evaluating mechanisms and algorithms (implemented as web services of an open-source tool suite) that consider information from learners' profiles as well as context information, and respectively extend existing learning systems with adaptive and intelligent capabilities. The developed tool suite will be highly useful for both researchers who can integrate the web services in their research prototypes and practitioners who will be able to use them in their learning systems, leading to far-reaching benefits for Canadian research and education.