WebCap: a Web-Based application to build a user profile in Real-Time
Presenter: Dr. Nesrine Zemirli, Vice-Head of the Information Systems Department in CCIS

Abstract: Due to the expansion and growing popularity of the web, getting the relevant information at the right time, when it becomes available are the crucial issues and the main strategic challenges for improving the business profits for the information access technologies. Today more than ever, it is widely assumed that the problem is not so much the availability of information but the ability to access and retrieve the relevant information to meet the personal user’s needs into the specific context. To  address these issues the personalization has been developed in order to tailoring the system’s responses to individual interests and improve the relevance of the user’s information access on the web taking into account the user’s contextual interests, his/her access preferences and his/her informational needs represented by his/her profile.

In the context of the personalized information retrieval, we present WebCap, a smart web application for inferring the user’s interests based on a real time implicit feedback. WebCap aims to collect implicitly the relevant documents, during the user’s search session by inference of the degree of interest based on a combination of some relevant implicit indicators. The main advantage of our approach is that it does not require any log file. Indeed, WebCap, a browser side tool, calculates the degree of interest in real time and decides if the web page is quite relevant to feed the search history dimension. Our experimental framework, with real users, shows that WebCap can collected implicitly 80% of the relevant documents compared to the explicit approach.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Nesrine Zemirli is an Assistant Professor at the Information Systems Department. College of Computer and Information Sciences at King Saud University. Dr. Nesrine holds a PhD in Computer Science from IRIT at Paul Sabatier University Toulouse III, France, specialized in the personalized of information access. She worked as a Lecturer and Researcher at various French Universities:  ISEP,  Paul Sabatier University Toulouse III, School of Engineering the INSA of Toulouse, Sciences Socials University Toulouse I and the University Center for Training and Research Jean-François Champollion of Albi, France. She also worked as a Research Engineer and project & web manager in a French and international business company (Amadeus SAS, Auditek SAS, Solimobile, Milestone SAS, etc.)
Dr. Zemirli's main research area is in:
• Personalized Information Retrieval.
• User Profiling and datamining
• Recommendation system.
• Social networks and web 2.0
• Semantic web.
Date: November 5, 2012

Time: 12:00-1:00pm

Location: Research Center Auditorium, Building 2, Malaz Campus