User Profile for Personalized Information Access

 

Personalized Information Access addressed the information overload problem by building, managing, presenting customized information for individual users. This customization may take the form of filtering irrelevant information and/or identifying additional information of likely interest for the user.

First of all, I apologized and I truly respect the privacy problem rising from the term “tracking”, but that’s actually how I started thinking about this topic.

Different from group profile modeling, we can model the communication among the social networking. Like there is a saying, “to know a person, better to know person close to him”, if you wanted to know someone well, it’s better to get to know friends close to him and to see how he interacts with them while you directly interact with him. For example, Joey posted his new Air Jordan shoes on facebook, and Mike later liked it some much by clicking like on this post. If we could model this activity as an interest of Mike, we surely would recommend this type of shoes to Mike in case we are doing online recommendation.  Maybe this example sounds naïve, however it conveys a new approach for modeling user profile in my opinion. As the development of social networking is exploding, actually I could not have a picture in mind of how individual’s life is going to be changed, but one thing will happen for sure is that people are more and more connected to each other. Given by the huge amount of communicational information among them, the user profile modeling would be quite different then.

Interestingly, when I had come up this idea, I did a little bit research into this area. IBM actually had started this research, in the paper “Unified Modeling of User Activities on Social Networking Sites” by IBM research, the author attempted at the unified modeling of various such activities on social networking sites to predict user’s future post, followship and friendship. This paper relates to my opinion on the same motivation of using huge amount of communicational information available for user modeling.

That’s an interesting topic and I will do further research on it.