Adaptive Hypermedia and the Web:
Supporting Multiple Lanes on the Information Superhighway
Dr. Dick Bulterman,
CWI (Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica), The Netherlands
Tuesday, Nov. 10th, 2:45-3:45 PM
While the current Web infrastructure has highlighted the benefits of global interconnectivity, it has also made painfully clear that for real communication to take place, more information adaptivity needs to take place across a diverse user community.
This talk will survey recent developments across the Web to address different needs, both technical and social. We start with a review of the expansion of Web languages and protocols to support richer-then-text types of data, including audio, video and animations. We do this by looking at the impact of these protocols and languages, such as RTP for data and SMIL for presentations, in the environment that a general Web user is likely to encounter. We then look at the issues of user-level adaptation of information. Such adaptation can be used to make the Web more accessible for the disabled -- but also for situations in which the general population may find it more convenient to substitute one encoding of information for another -- and how adaptation can be used to allow information to be reused in many situations.
We hope to show that supporting adaptation of content is a natural extension of the current forms of information presentation, and that it holds the key to understanding the real-life added value of digital communication.
Dick Bulterman is head of Multimedia and Human-Computer Interaction at CWI in Amsterdam, where he is senior researcher.
During the past five years, he has headed the CMIF project, which has studied network-based hypermedia authoring and presentation systems. He has participated in the W3C SYMM working group that produced the SMIL specification and has long been interested in adapting information to fit the needs of the user.
He received his Sc.M. (1977) and Ph.D. (1981) in Computer Science from Brown University (USA). From 1980-1988, he was an assistant professor of enginering at Brown, working in the Laboratory for Man/Machine Systems.
Since joining CWI in 1988, he has held teaching appointments at the University of Amsterdam and the University of Utrecht, as well as visitng appointments at Brown University. He also held a visiting professorship at the University of Delft in 1985.
Dr. Bulterman is on the editorial board of Multimedia Tools and Applications, as well as Springer/ACM's Multimedia Systems. He is a member of Sigma Xi, the IEEE Computer Society and the ACM.