The Decision-Theoretic Video Advisor

We describe ongoing work toward development of a decision-theoretic agent to help users choose videos based on their preferences. The DIVA (DecisionTheoretic Interactive Video Advisor) system elicits user preferences using a case-based technique. Hard constraints are used to permit the user to communicate temporary deviations from his basic preferences. If the user is not happy with the system’s recommendations, he can provide feedback, which is used to modify the represented preferences and generate a new set of recommendations. We describe the fundamental algorithms, the implementation, and some results from some initial experimentation.