In recent years we have seen substantial progress being made in the area of interactive adaptive systems. Nevertheless, there are still a number of challenges that need to be addressed before adaptivity becomes a widely employed "instrument" in the design and implementation of adaptive systems. Firstly, there is still little empirically validated evidence as to what adaptation methods and techniques work, for what categories of users, and in what contexts of use. Secondly, although formulating design goals for adaptivity is relatively easy, evaluating against such goals has proven to be a complicated and elusive target.
This presentation will introduce self-regulation and proceed to discuss how its employment may facilitate addressing these two problems. Self-regulation refers to an adaptive system's capacity to perform self-evaluation against design objectives, formulate and accumulate new adaptation knowledge, and use that knowledge to modify its own adaptive behaviour. The presentation will provide an introduction to the concept of self-regulation, and the requirements it places on the adaptation infrastructure, as well as on the design and implementation process itself. It will then discuss the opportunities arising from its employment as a support tool for the early design phases of adaptation, as well as how it can help attain a degree of self-evolution in deployed adaptive systems.
Alexandros Paramythis has long-standing experience in the design, development and evaluation of adaptive systems and has participated in several national and international research projects on the theme of adaptable and adaptive interaction. He is co-maintainer of the EASy-Hub portal (http://www.easy-hub.org/), which is the normative source of theoretical and practical information on the evaluation of adaptive systems.
Mr. Paramythis is the co-organiser of the international workshop series on "User-centred Design and Evaluation of Adaptive Systems", with five successful workshops, held in conjunction with major international conferences, in its record.
His current work in the area of adaptive systems focuses on the exploration of the theoretical underpinnings, as well as the implementation challenges, of meta-adaptive hypermedia systems, and specifically the use of self-regulation in the second-level adaptation cycle. In this context, his work is also addressing the integration of different modelling and reasoning (adaptation logic) approaches into a common meta-adaptive framework.
A second area of focus is adaptive e-learning and specifically the provision of adaptive support for collaborative learning activities. Finally, Mr. Paramythis is leading an effort aimed at the establishment of a common decomposition model and accompanying framework for the layered evaluation of adaptive systems.
For more information see at: http://www.fim.uni-linz.ac.at/staff/paramythis/
