The goal of the proposed research is to enhance group experiences in a museum by: (1) intelligent distribution of information across several devices, allowing members of a group to follow a public presentation while their personal interests are addressed through individual annotations on a private device, and (2) navigation support of the whole group, by finding a route through the museum that ...

Personal identity has many facets, as it involves race, language, personal interests, religion, and ethnicity, among other attributes. Yet all over the world individuals and groups seek to define themselves in exclusive terms. This paper develops a simple model of individual incentives and group interests to explain this puzzle. ∗Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge. †Faculty of Econom...

Serious illness puts pressure not only on individual family members but also on the family itself. The care of an acutely ill child requires the family to channel many of its resources toward a single member--an arrangement that can usually be sustained for a while but that cannot continue indefinitely while the other members do without. Illness disrupts ordinary familial functions and, if it i...

In this paper, we address the problem of personalization in question answering (QA). We describe the personalization component of YourQA, our web-based QA system, which creates individual models of users based on their reading level and interests. First, we explain how user models are dynamically created, saved and updated to filter and re-rank the answers. Then, we focus on how the user’s inte...

Browsers such as Mosaic are popular tools to explore large repositories of information (e.g., the Internet). Yet users of a browser will be served even better by a tool that is capable of customizing itself to the individual needs and interests of its current user. This paper reports on the design of a browser customization tool which automatically and autonomously identifies personally relevan...

Recent work on the nature of luck widely endorses the thesis that an event is good or bad luck for an individual only if it is significant for that individual. In this paper, I explore this thesis, showing that it raises questions about interests, well-being, and the philosophical uses of luck. In Sect. 1, I examine several accounts of significance, due to Pritchard (2005), Coffman (2007), and ...

My research is in the area of algebraic combinatorics, with an emphasis on problems from commutative algebra and algebraic geometry. The connection between algebra and combinatorics has had many implications in both fields. In combinatorics the highlights include Stanley’s proofs of the upper bound conjecture [21] and the g-theorem [22] using the theory of Cohen-Macaulay rings and toric varieti...

The recent explosion of the Internet and the rapid technological advances in gathering and storing information have resulted in huge amounts of data being collected at a very rapid rate. Developing ways to extract relevant information from such large amounts of data in a human comprehensible form and at the same time in a timely and cost effective way is of great practical importance. Approxima...

I first got introduced to research when I was an undergraduate, with Professor Sven Sigurðsson and the late Professor Kjartan G. Magnússon at the University of Iceland. I programmed and simulated a model for the migration of the Icelandic capelin (Mallotus villosus) [1], which is a small pelagic fish in the Icelandic waters [2, 3], briefly discussed below. During my graduate studies, with Profe...

Web application development is undergoing a major transition from being exclusively web-centric towards becoming more user-centric. However, to a large extent, today’s web browsers, which are poised to facilitate this enriched user experience, are far from being ready for this transition. The goal of my research is to contribute to the design and development of the next generation of web browse...