User Modeling in Social and Mobile Computing
The ever-growing social media and mobile computing platforms provide invaluable sources of information for modeling the behavior of users. High-quality user models enable superior services and functions for end users. In this talk, I will present several examples of user modeling based on social networks and social media. I will first describe our research in modeling users' information preferences on Microblogs using a novel user message model. I will then discuss our work on extracting users' daily activities, such as dining and shopping, that inherently reflect their habits, intents and preferences. I explain our novel transfer learning solution via a collaborative boosting framework comprising a text-to-activity classifier for socially connected users. I will also discuss our work on modeling the user behavior in mobile computing environments for building context-aware and adaptive information agents. The video of his talk can be watched here.
Qiang Yang is the head of Huawei Noah's Ark Research Lab and a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests are data mining and artificial intelligence including machine learning, planning and activity recognition. He is a fellow of AAAI, IEEE, IAPR and AAAS. He received his PhD from Computer Science Department of the University of Maryland, College Park in 1989. He had been an assistant/associate professor at the University of Waterloo between 1989 and 1995, and a professor and NSERC Industrial Research Chair at Simon Fraser University in Canada from 1995 to 2001. He was a vice chair of ACM SIGART between 2010 and 2013 and is the founding Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM TIST). He is also on the editorial board of IEEE Intelligent Systems AI Magazine etc. He has served as a PC co-chair and general co-chair of several international conferences, including ACM KDD 2010 and 2012, ACM RecSys 2013, ACM IUI 2010, etc. He serves as an IJCAI trustee and will be the PC chair for IJCAI 2015.