When: Friday, April 22, 2005, 12:00 noon

Where: Room 501,  IS Building

Talk 1:

Who: Rosta Farzan, Intelligent Systems Program, University of Pittsburgh

Title: Social Navigation Support through Annotation-Based Group Modeling

Abstract: Closed corpus AH systems demonstrate what is possible to achieve with adaptive hypermedia technologies. However, they are impractical for dealing with the large volume of open corpus resources. Our Knowledge Sea project explores social navigation support, an approach for providing open corpus personalized guidance that is based on past learners interaction with the system. The most recent stage of our project focuses on using annotations for social navigation support. In this talk, I present Knowledge Sea II, which implements annotation-based social navigation support, and report the results of several classroom studies, which have evaluated this technology.

Short bio: Rosta Farzan is a second year PhD student at Intelligent Systems Program. She is interested in research related to educational adaptive hypermedia, social navigation, collaborative information retrieval, and intelligent user interface in educational settings. She received her bachelor degree of Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Iran and her Masters of Computer Science from California State University. She is pursuing her research under supervision of Dr. Peter Brusilovsky.

Talk 2:

Who: Denis Nkweteyim, School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh

Title: On the Design of Hyperlink Recommender Systems

Abstract: This talk will be a dry run of my dissertation presentation. I will talk about key factors and techniques involved in the design of hyperlink recommender systems that recommend to current users, web pages that past users of a web site found interesting, and identify interesting research questions in the following areas, and approaches used in the dissertation to tackle them: Web Page Classification, data mining, prediction models for user interests, and clustering.

Short bio: Denis Nkweteyim is a PhD candidate in the Information Science program of DIST. His current interests are in personalization systems and data mining.