Background and Motivation

Although personalisation is recognised as an effective approach in several application areas, it is still not very clear whether adaptive hypermedia systems can accommodate individual differences effectively, in terms of providing individualised navigation support, delivering personalised content, adapting the presentation or the layout to the needs of the user. Existing applications mainly consider users’ preferences based on collecting explicit or implicit information, and emphasise on prior knowledge. Clearly, there is a number of important human factors, such as gender differences, cognitive styles, personality factors, cultural backgrounds and so on that have not been fully explored, as well as techniques for adaptivity that can be potentially useful to accommodate individual differences. To fill this gap, this workshop will explore how to embrace the various dimensions of individual differences into adaptive hypermedia, and will investigate the impacts of individual differences on the design, implementation and use of adaptive hypermedia systems.

Topics and Research Questions

Individuals differ in traits such as skills, aptitudes and preferences for processing information, constructing meaning from information, and applying it to real-world situations. The topics discussed in this workshop will address various dimensions of individual differences, such as the level of knowledge or literacy, gender, culture, spatial abilities, cognitive styles, accessibility issues for the disable and elderly. The Workshop will explore how individual differences theory can be integrated into the design, development and implementation of adaptive hypermedia applications, and investigate how individual differences considerations influence the use of adaptive hypermedia applications.

Papers submitted to this Workshop must contribute towards addressing research questions related to at least one of the following aspects:

- How adaptive hypermedia can improve accessibilities by providing multi modalities that satisfy users with special needs?

- What design guidelines should be established for development, and what criteria are needed for evaluating adaptive hypermedia that can accommodate individual differences?

- How different dimensions of individual differences can be combined in an adaptive hypermedia system?

- What type of information is needed from user profiles to identify the effects of individual differences on user’s preferences?

- What kind of ontologies are needed for representing individual differences dimensions in the user model and the personalisation engine of adaptive hypermedia systems?

- What are the relationships between individual differences and features of adaptive hypermedia systems?

Submission Formats

Each submission must address at least one of the main workshop questions. Full papers should not exceed 10 pages and should be formatted according to the Springer’s LNCS style. Please refer to the submission section on the workshop's web pages for details on the camera-ready format of the papers.

Workshop papers will be published in full length in the workshop proceedings and presented orally at the Workshop.

Please, submit your paper by e-mail to George Magoulas (gmagoulas@dcs.bbk.ac.uk) by May 10, 2004. Postscript (*.ps), Portable Document Format (*.pdf) or MS-Word files are preferred.

Important Dates

May 28, 2004: submission of papers -- Extended dealine
June 10, 2004: notification of results
July 01, 2004: delivery of camera-ready paper
August 23, 2004: Workshop date; the main conference will last until August 26, 2004

Workshop Committee

Contact Person