Who are my users and how I can help them? The quest of user-adaptive interaction

The potential of computers as interactive tools that support a large
variety of users in a growing range of tasks is constantly increasing.
However, designing complex interactive systems that
satisfy the needs of individual users from highly heterogeneous user
groups is very difficult. This talk focuses on research that aims to
overcome this difficulty by investigating how to devise interactive
systems that can autonomously, dynamically and unobtrusively adapt to
the specific needs of each individual user, namely research in
User-Adaptive Interaction (UAI).

I will present an  example  of UAI researcher that we are conducting
in our laboratory,  on  devising  User-Adaptive
Visualizations. In particular, I will discuss our initial results on
which individual differences can impact visualization processing, how
these and other relevant  interaction states can be captured using
eye-tracking,  and  how to provide personalized support that can
improve the user's experience with a visualization

Bio:
Dr. Conati is  an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.  She  received a
“Laurea” degree (M.Sc. equivalent) in Computer Science at the
University of Milan, Italy (1988), as well as  a M.Sc. (1996) and
Ph.D. (1999) in Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh.
  Dr. Conati’s research goal is to integrate research in Artificial
Intelligence (AI), Cognitive Science and Human Computer Interaction
(HCI) to make complex interactive systems increasingly more effective
and adaptive to the users’ needs. Her areas of interest include
Intelligent User Interfaces, User Modeling, User-adaptive Systems and
Affective Computing. Her research has
received awards from the International Conference on User Modeling,
the International Conference of AI in Education, the
International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (2007) and the
Journal of User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction (2002). Dr.
Conati  is an Associate Editor for the Journal of AI in Education, for
the  IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and for the ACM
Transactions on Intelligent Interactive Systems.