Abstract
This paper presents a framework for personal agents that respect the privacy of the individual. We present some motivations and outline a framework for the use of personal agents and user profiling for information systems designed around web services. A key element of our approach in general is to consider the impact of user-profiling and autonomous agents on the user. One particular aspect, which we explore in this paper, is the need to respect user’s privacy. One often-cited benefit of using personal agents is for personalising interaction. However, personalisation and privacy have contradictory goals in disclosing personal information. We explore some elements of our framework that allow the user to control the trade-offs around disclosure of personal information. We conclude with some motivating examples of the use of our framework in information-based tasks.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Pretschner, A and Gauch, S. Personalization on the Web. (ITTC-FY2000-TR-13591-01) Information and Telecommunication Technology Center, University of Kansas. 1999. Available from: http://homer.ittc.ukans.edu/website/publications/papers/pers-tr.pdf
Fink J. & Kobsa A. “A Review and Analysis of Commercial User Modeling Servers for Personalization on the World Wide Web”. User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction. Vol. 11. Kluwer, 2001. pp. 209–249.
Crabtree I. B., Soltysiak S. J. & Thint M. P. “Adaptive Personal Agents”. Personal Technologies. Vol. 2:3. 1998. pp. 141–151. Available from: http://www.bt.com/bttj/vol16no3/13.htm
Franklin, S. & Graesser, A. “Is It an Agent or Just a Program? A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents”. In: Muller, J. P., Wooldridge, M., & Jennings, N. (eds) Intelligent Agents III Proceedings of Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages (ATAL 96). Springer, 1996. pp. 21–36.
Dickinson, Ian. The interface as agent: a comparative review of human-agent interaction. HP Labs Technical Report. In preparation.
Pazzani M. “A Framework for Collaborative, Content-Based and Demographic Filtering”. Artificial Intelligence Review. Vol. 13:5–6. 1999. pp. 393–408.
Webb G., Pazzani M. & Billsus D. “Machine Learning for User Modeling”. User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction. Vol. 11. Kluwer, 2001. pp. 19–29.
Kobsa A. “Generic User Modeling Systems”. User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction. Vol. 11. 2001. pp. 49–63.
Riché, Stephanie, Brebner Gavin, and Gittler, Mickey. Client-side profile storage: a means to put the user in control. (in preparation) HP Laboratories. 2001.
Kindberg, Tim and Barton, John. A web-based nomadic computing experience. (HPL-2000-110) HP Laboratories. 2000. Available from: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2000/HPL-2000-110.html
Chen, Harry and Tolia, Sovrin. Steps towards creating a context-aware software agent system. (HPL-2001-231) Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. 2001. Available from: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2001/HPL-2001-231.html
Butler, Mark. DELI: a delivery context library for CC/PP and UAProf. (HPL-2001-260) HP Laboratories. 2001. Available from: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2001/HPL-2001-260.html
Butler, Mark. Current technologies for device independence. (HPL-2001-93) HP Laboratories. 2001. Available from: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2001/HPL-2001-83.html
Barton, John and Kindberg, Tim. The Cooltown user experience. (HPL-2001-22) HP Laboratories. 2001. Available from: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2001/HPL-2001-22.html
Pohl W. “Logic-Based Representation and Reasoning for User Modelling Shell Systems”. User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction. Vol. 9:3. Kluwer, 1999. pp. 217–282.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P). 2001. Web site: http://www.w3.org/P3P/
HP Web Services. 2001. Web site: http://www.e-speak.hp.com
World Wide Web Consortium. XML Protocol. 2001. Web site: http://www.w3.org/2000/xp
W3C. W3C Semantic Web Activity. 2001. Web site: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/
Berners-Lee, Tim, Hendler, James, and Lassila, Ora “The Semantic Web”. Scientific American. 2001.
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The Resource Description Framework (RDF). 1999. Web site: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/
Berners-Lee, Tim, Fielding, and Masinter, L. Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax. (RFC2396) Internet Draft Standard. 1998.
Chandrasekaran B., Josephson J. R. & Benjamins V. R. “What Are Ontologies, and Why Do We Need Them?”. IEEE Intelligent Systems. Vol. 14:1. 1999. pp. 20–26.
van Harmelen, Frank, Patel-Schneider, Peter, and Horrocks, Ian. A Model-Theoretic Semantics for DAML+OIL (March 2001) Revision 4.1. 2001. Available from: http://www.daml.org/2001/03/model-theoretic-semantics.html
Internet Mail Consortium. vCard White Paper. 1997. Web site: http://www.imc.org/pdi/vcardwhite.html
Good, N., Schafer, J. B., Konstan, J., Borchers, A., Sarwar, B., Herlocker, J., & Riedl, J. “Combining Collaborative Filtering With Personal Agents for Better Recommendations”. In: Proc. 16th National Conference on AI (AAAI-99). AAAI Press, 1999. pp. 439–446.
Brown, Barry and Sellen, Abigail. Exploring users’ experiences of the web. (HPL-2001-262) HP Labs Technical Report. 2001. Available from: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2001/HPL-2001-262.html
Wiederhold G. “Mediators in the Architecture of Future Information Systems”. Computer. Vol. 25:3. 1992. pp. 38–49.
Cavoukian A, Tapscott D. Who knows: safeguarding your privacy in a networked world McGraw-Hill, 1996.
Cavoukian, Ann. Privacy: The Key to Electronic Commerce. The Information and Privacy Commissioner/Ontario. Available from: http://www.ipc.on.ca/english/pubpres/papers/e-comm.htm
Cavoukian, Ann. Data Mining: Staking a Claim on Your Privacy. Information and Privacy Commisioner/Ontario. 1998. Available from: http://www.ipc.on.ca/english/pubpres/papers/datamine.htm
Cavoukian, Ann and Gurski, Mike “Managing Privacy: a Challenge in Designing Today’s Systems”. Municipal Interface. 2000. Available from: http://www.ipc.on.ca/english/pubpres/ext-pub/misa-00.pdf
Wright, Tom. Privacy Protection Makes Good Business Sense. 1994. Available from: http://www.ipc.on.ca/english/pubpres/papers/busi-e.htm
Bowbrick, S. “Multiple Identities in the Online World”. In: Proc. First Digital Identity Workshop. hyperion.co.uk, 2000. Available from: http://www.consult.hyperion.co.uk/PDFlibrary/y2000/bowbrick. pdf
Microsoft.NET Passport. 2001. Web site: http://www.passport.com
The Liberty Alliance Project. 2001. Web site: http://www.projectliberty.org
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) 1.0 Specification. 2001. Web site: http://www.w3.org/TR/p3p
Banks, David and Reynolds, David. Method and System for Controlling the On-Line Supply of Digital Products or the Access to On-Line Services. Patent application (UK 0103984.1 ). Filed 17-Feb.-2001.
Brands S. Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures and Digital Certificates; Building in Privacy ISBN 0-262-02491-8. MIT Press, 2000.
_Vora, Poorvi, Vazirani, Umesh, and Knapp, Verna. Probabilistic Privacy Protection. Patent applied for. (USA 10004309-1 ). Filed Dec.-2000.
Lieberman, H. “Letizia: an Agent That Assists Web Browsing”. In: Proc. Internation Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’ 95). Morgan Kaufmann, 1995. pp. 924–929.
Joachims, T., Freitag, D., & Mitchell, T. “WebWatcher: a Tour Guide for the World Wide Web”. In: Proc. 15th International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI 97). Morgan-Kaufmann, 1997. pp. 770–775.
Mladenic D. “Text-Learning and Related Intelligent Agents: a Survey”. IEEE Intelligent Systems. Vol. 14:4. IEEE, 1999. pp. 44–54.
Chen, L. & Sycara, K. “WebMate-a Personal Agent for Browsing and Searching”. In: Proc. 2nd International Conf on Autonomous Agents. ACM, 1998. pp. 132–139.
Maes P. “Agents That Reduce Work and Information Overload”. Communications of the ACM. Vol. 37:7. ACM, 1994. pp. 31–40.
Anderson, C., Domingos, P., & Weld, D. “Web Site Personalizers for Mobile Devices”. In: Anand, S. S. & Mobasher, B. (Co-chairs) Proc. IJCAI 2001 Workshop on Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization. IJCAI Inc, 2001. pp. 47–52.
Pretschner, A. & Gauch, S. “Ontology Based Personalized Search”. In: Proceedings 11th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence. TAI 99. IEEE Computer Society. pp. 391–398.
NEC Research Institute. ResearchIndex-the NECI Scientific Literature Digital Library. 2001. Web site: http://www.researchindex.com
Aggarwal, C. C. & Yu, P. S. “On Text Mining Techniques for Personalization”. In: Proc. 7th Internaltional Workshop on New Directions in Rough Sets, Data Mining and Granular Soft Computing RSDMGrC’99. Springer-Verlag, 1999. pp. 12–18.
Cayzer, Steve and Aickelin, Uwe. A Recommender System based on the Immune Network. (in preparation) 2001.
Dasgupta D. Artificial Immune Systems and Their ApplicationsSpringer-Verlag, 1998.
Compaq Systems Research Centre. EachMovie Collaborative Filtering Data Set. Web site: http://www.research.compaq.com/SRC/eachmovie/
Delgado J. & Ishii N. “Multi-Agent Learning in Recommender Systems For Information Filtering on the Internet”. International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems. Vol. 10:1–2. 2001. pp. 81–100.
Adamic, Lada and Adar, Eytan. “Friends and Neighbors on the Web” unpublished manuscript. 2000Available from: http://www.hpl.hp.com/shl/people/eytan/fandn.html
Soltysiak S. J. & Crabtree I. B. “Automatic Learning of User Profiles — Towards the Personalisation of Agent Services”. BT Technology Journal. Vol. 16:3. 1998. pp. 110–117. Available from: http://www.bt.com/bttj/vol16no3/13.htm
Soltysiak, S. J. & Crabtree, B. “Knowing Me, Knowing You: Practical Issues in the Personalisation of Agent Technology”. In: Proc. Third International Conf. on the Practical Applications of Intelligent Agents and Multi-Agent Technology (PAAM98). 1998. pp. 467–484.
Salton T. & Buckley C. “Term-Weighting Approaches in Automated Text Retrieval”. Information Processing & Management. Vol. 24:5. 1988. pp. 513–23.
Chaffee, J. & Gauch, S. “Personal Ontologies for Web Navigation”. In: Proc. 9th International Conf. on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM’00). 2000. pp. 227–234. Available from: http://homer.ittc.ukans.edu/website/publications/papers/chaf feeCIKM2000.pdf
Orwant J. “Heterogenous Learning in the Dopplegänger User Modeling System”. User modeling and user adapted interaction. Vol. 4:2. 1994-1995. pp. 107–130.
Paiva A. & Self J. “TAGUS-a User and Learner Modeling Workbench”. User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction. Vol. 4:3. 1995. pp. 197–226.
Kay, J. “Vive La Difference! Individualised Interaction With Users”. In: Proc. International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI) 1995. Morgan-Kaufmann, 1995. pp. 978–84.
Weal, Mark, Hughes, Gareth, Millard, David, and Moreau, Luc. Open Hypermedia as a Navigational Interface to Ontological Information Spaces. (ECSTR-IAM01-004) University of Southampton. 2001. Available from: http://www.bib.ecs.soton.ac.uk/records/5161
Erickson, J., Williamson, M., Reynolds, D., Vora, P., & Rodgers, P. “Principles for Standardization and Interoperability in Web-Based Digital Rights Management”. In: Proc. W3C Workshop on Digital Rights Management (DRM). Jan 2001: Available from: http://www.w3.org/2000/12/drm-ws/pp/hp-erickson.html
Vora, P., Reynolds, D., Dickinson, I., Erickson, J., & Banks, D. “Privacy and Digital Rights Management”. In: Proc. W3C Workshop on Digital Rights Management (DRM). 2001. Available from: http://www.w3.org/2000/12/drm-ws/pp/hp-poorvi2.html
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). A P3P Prefenence Exchange Language (APPEL) 1.0 Working Draft. 2001. Web site: http://www.w3.org/TR/P3P-preferences.html
Duncan G. T. & Mukherjee S. “Optimal Disclosure Limitation Strategy in Statistical Databases: Deterring Tracker Attacks Through Additive Noise”. Journal of the American Statistical Association. Vol. 95:451. 1998. pp. 720–729. Available from: http://duncan.heinz.cmu.edu/GeorgeWeb/OptimalDisclosure Limitation 98 June 16.htm
Beck L. L. “A Security Mechanism for Statistical Databases”. ACM Transactions On Database Systems. Vol. 5:3. 1980. pp. 316–318.
Schlorer J. “Security of Statistical Databases: Multidimensional Transformation”. ACM Transactions On Database Systems. Vol. 6:1. 1981. pp. 95–112. Available from: http://www.acm.org/pubs/articles/journals/tods/1981-6-1/p95-schlorer/p95-schlorer.pdf
Adam N. R. & Wortmann J. C. “Security-Control Methods for Statistical Databases: a Comparative Study”. ACM Computing Surveys. Vol. 21:4. 1989. pp. 515–556.
Agrawal, R. & Srikant, R. “Privacy-Preserving Data Mining”. In: Proc. of the 2000 ACM SIGMOD Conference on Management of Data. ACM, 2000. pp. 439–450.
Rosheisen, R. M. A Network-Centric Design for Relationship-Based Rights Management (PhD Thesis). Stanford University. 1997.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dickinson, I., Reynolds, D., Banks, D., Cayzer, S., Vora, P. (2003). User Profiling with Privacy: A Framework for Adaptive Information Agents. In: Klusch, M., Bergamaschi, S., Edwards, P., Petta, P. (eds) Intelligent Information Agents. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2586. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36561-3_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36561-3_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-00759-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-36561-7
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive