Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica

In the past twenty years, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been used in a variety of applications, such as digital games, mobile devices, and web-based learning. These applications are employed to support users with heterogeneous backgrounds, in terms of their knowledge, skills, and needs. Therefore, individual differences play an important role in the development of such applications. To this end, there is a need to provide individualization to accommodate users’ individual differences, including prior knowledge, gender differences and cognitive styles. Individualization can be reached by offering customization and personalization, which, however, have different notions. Customization uses adaptability that enables users to adapt the content layout and navigation support to their preferences by themselves while Personalization requires adaptivity to make an automatic adaptation for users. The former is system-driven while the latter is user-driven. In other words, these two approaches provide pros and cons of controllability to users. Accordingly, this talk covers two parts. The first part emphasizes on how individual differences influences the use of the aforementioned applications while the second part focuses on how personalization and customization can be used to accommodate users’ individual differences.

Dr. Sherry Y. Chen is currently a Chair Professor at Graduate Institute of Network Learning Technology, National Central University, Taiwan and a Visiting Professor in the School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics at Brunel University, UK. In 2010, she was granted an Outstanding Scholar Award (傑出人才講座) from the Foundation for the Advancement of Outstanding Scholarship (FAOS, 傑出人才發展基金會).

Dr. Chen received her PhD degree from the University of Sheffield, UK in 2000 and then worked as a academic faculty in the School of Information Systems, Computing and Mathematics at Brunel University, UK from 2000 to 2009. Her main research interest focuses on how to develop individualized information space that can accommodate users’ individual differences, including collaborative learning, digital libraries, game-based learning, mobile learning, and web-based learning. She has more than 120 publications in these areas.