Wednesday, 8th December 2010, 10:00 am (SCE Meeting Room)
Speaker: Prof. Julita Vassileva (Computer Science, The University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
Title: Social Learning: designing for personalization and participation
Abstract:
The talk will provide an overview some of the user needs arising with the
proliferation of the social web: finding suitable stuff for the context and
personalized needs of users, finding suitable people to work/play/learn with, and
engaging people as active contributors. The talk will discuss technologies that can
be useful for designers of long-tail (niche) applications for the social web. These
technologies are characterized by being light-weight and depending on end-user
contribution. Some examples will be shown of technologies for end-user semantic
annotation, personalized and socially-enhanced search and recommendation,
decentralized user modeling and adaptation through trust and reputation mechanisms.
Special attention will be given to the design of incentive mechanisms for user
participation, on which the success of these technologies crucially depend.
Biography: Julita Vassileva is a professor of computer science at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. She received her PhD in Mathematics / Computer Science from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. In the 1990s Julita worked mostly in the areas of instructional planning, user modeling, adaptive information access and adaptive hypermedia. Her focus in the current decade has been on decentralized environments: multi-agent systems (agent negotiation, trust and reputation systems), peer-to-peer systems, online communities and particularly on the human issues of decentralized learning environments: new architectures for user modeling and personalization, designing incentive mechanisms for encouraging participation and facilitating trust.