All's well that ends well…

Caspar Bowden just sent me a bad news / good news missive which I'd like to share with all of you.

First, the bad news.

We've all missed the 10th International Conference on User Modeling (UM’05) in Edinburgh, UK, which, according to Caspar, was fantastic. The conference was intended for researchers and practitioners both in the domain of personalization systems and in the area of privacy and security:

Personalizing people's interaction with computer systems entails gathering considerable amounts of data about them. As numerous recent surveys have consistently demonstrated, computer users are very concerned about their privacy. Moreover, the collection of personal data is also subject to legal regulations in many countries and states. Such regulations impact a number of frequently employed personalization methods. This workshop will explore the potential of research on “privacy-enhanced personalization,” which aims at reconciling the goals and methods of user modeling and personalization with privacy constraints imposed by individual preferences, conventions and laws.

And now the good news.

The proceedings are available online.

Caspar “recommended” Privacy, Shilling, and The Value of Information in Recommender Systems by Shyong K Lam and John Riedl (page 85).

I don't know if I agree with him, because as I was trying to skip forward to page 85, I fell deeply into Perceived Control: Scales for Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing by Sarah Spiekermann on page 3. You don't see enough empirical verification – so I find this kind of study fascinating. And there are a lot of other really good papers here.

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Kim Cameron

Work on identity.