Predicting Users' Requests on the WWW

Ingrid Zukerman
Computer Science and Software Engineering
Monash University

Friday, 29th October 1999
0930 - 1100

Conference Room
CSIRO Mathematical & Information Sciences
Ground Floor, 723 Swanston Street, Melbourne.

Abstract:

In this talk, I will describe several Markov models derived from the behaviour patterns of many users, which predict which WWW documents a user is likely to request next.  I will present comparative results of the predictive accuracy of the different models, and, based on these results, build hybrid models which combine the individual models in different ways.  These hybrid models generally have a greater predictive accuracy than the individual models. The best models have been incorporated in a decision-theoretic system for pre-sending WWW documents.

Biosketch:

Ingrid Zukerman is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Monash University.  She received her B.Sc. degree in Industrial Engineering and Management and her M.Sc. degree in Operations Research from the Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology.  She received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from UCLA in 1986.  Since then, she has been working in the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Monash University.  Her areas of interest are discourse planning, plan recognition and agent modeling.