Multimodal interfaces are becoming increasingly ubiquitous with the advent of mobile devices, accessibility considerations, and novel software technologies that combine diverse interaction media. In addition to improving access and delivery capabilities, such interfaces enable flexible and personalized dialogs with websites, much like a conversation between humans. In this paper, we present a software framework for multimodal web interaction management that supports mixed-initiative dialogs between users and websites. A mixed-initiative dialog is one where the user and the website take turns changing the flow of interaction. The framework supports the functional specification and realization of such dialogs using staging transformations -- a theory for representing and reasoning about dialogs based on partial input. It supports multiple interaction interfaces, and offers sessioning, caching, and co-ordination functions through the use of an interaction manager. Two case studies are presented to illustrate the promise of this approach.

Personalization constitutes the mechanisms necessary to automatically customize information content, structure, and presentation to the end-user to reduce information overload. Unlike traditional approaches to personalization, the central theme of our approach is to model a website as a program and conduct website transformation for personalization by program transformation (e.g., partial evaluation, program slicing). The goal of this paper is study personalization through a program transformation lens, and develop a formal model, based on program transformations, for personalized interaction with hierarchical hypermedia. The specific research issues addressed involve identifying and developing program representations and transformations suitable for classes of hierarchical hypermedia, and providing supplemental interactions for improving the personalized experience. The primary form of personalization discussed is out-of-turn interaction – a technique which empowers a user navigating a hierarchical website to postpone clicking on any of the hyperlinks presented on the current page and, instead, communicate the

Although the wealth of information provided by the World-Wide Web is of great value, most of its content is designed for desktop computers. In days when people are becoming increasingly mobile, and hence utilises devises with much smaller screens, much of this information in reality becomes inaccessible. The same is true also for organisational intranets. However, the content management systems (CMS) being used within organisations offer new and unexplored possibilities to present information. In this paper, we describe a CMSbased approach to visualise web information in a PDA, show the benefits of such an approach, and share the lessons learned from deploying this technique in an organisational context.

Recommendation and personalization attempt to reduce information overload and retain customers. While research in both recommender systems and personalization grew mainly out of information retrieval, both areas have emerged from nascent levels to veritable and challenging research areas in their own right. Whereas no technical or sophisticated methodologies exist by which to build such systems, the field also lacks a comprehensive, yet manageable survey by which to study recommenda-tion systems and personalization facilities. In this paper, we attempt to fill that gap by presenting a thematic approach toward studying recommendation and personalization. Specifically, we present three major representative personalization themes: rec-ommendation; induction, exploration, and exploitation of social networks; and personalization of information access. We unify the presentation of the three themes which we have extracted from the rich landscape of recommender system and personal-ization research via a functional metaphor, where inputs and output to a function are identified in each theme and instantiated through a number of systems and projects visited. In addition, we examine how a number of systems implement the function through various operators and techniques. Finally, we cover several broadening aspects, such as targeting, privacy and trust,

Although the wealth of information provided by the World-Wide Web is of great value, most of its content is designed for desktop computers. In days when people are becoming increasingly mobile, and hence utilises devises with much smaller screens, much of this information in reality becomes inaccessible. The same is true also for organisational intranets. However, the content management systems (CMS) being used within organisations offer new and unexplored possibilities to present information. In this paper, we describe a CMSbased approach to visualise web information in a PDA, show the benefits of such an approach, and share the lessons learned from deploying this technique in an organisational context.