A crucial element in B2C e-commerce is a search tool that not only finds the product that best matches the user's needs (personalization), but also convinces him that he has made the best choice (decision support). Personalization is believed to play a key role in converting site visitors to buyers in second generation e-commerce, while decision support has long been considered important for choice problems.

Two specific implementations of personalization are popular today:
recommendation systems and decision-based search tools. However, their wide adoption in online environments is limited. This tutorial will outline the impediments delaying consumer's readiness for these tools, as well as opportunities presented in 2nd generation e-commerce. The tutorial will also present and compare personalized search tools and recommendation systems. The critical difference between search (a user involved task) vs. recommendation (an automation task) will be explained. The key issue is the analysis of the context in which users will likely accept recommendations, and when they will not. This tutorial then introduces a decision search tool, SmartClient, that has been developed in our laboratories in the past few years. A SmartClient system for travel planning is currently being deployed by a business travel provider in Europe.

SmartClient provides fluid, robust, and opportunistic interaction experience, and "affords" users to express hidden preferences and revise ill-stated search criteria. A set of interaction principles of this interaction will be demonstrated via comparing example critiquing with other approaches. Tutorial participants will get hands-on evaluation experience with this interface technology in a demo version.

Pearl H.Z. Pu, an honorary alumnus of the ZheJiang university, is the director of the human computer interaction group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Switzerland. She was born and raised in Shanghai, China, but moved to the United States shortly after finishing high school and taking the university entrance exam. She majored in mathematics and computer science in Queens College, the City University of New York and finished her bachelor degree in 1983. Later she obtained her Master and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in artificial intelligence and computer graphics in 1985 and 1989 respectively. She became an assistant professor at age 27 in the US. After five years, she decided to move to Switzerland, becoming a research scientist and director of the current group. She has worked and published widely in artificial intelligence and human computer interaction: qualitative physics, case based reasoning, constraint satisfaction, multimedia management, information retrieval, and information visualization. In the last five years, she has been both intrigued by human decision processes, as well as motivated to improve them via computer tools and intelligent user interfaces. She uniquely combines theories and techniques from decision psychology, economics, human interaction theory, and constraint satisfaction techniques.

She was co-founder and the chairman of Iconomic Systems (1997-2001), and a recent visiting professor at the database and human computer interaction laboratories at Stanford University.

This tutorial is focusing on non-technical aspects of the transformation of economy to electronic economy and society to global information society. The aim of this tutorial is to present and discuss a number of problems that people and societies will be faced in coming years as a result of the development and massive application of information and communication technologies. The main fields of interest are: economy, labor, society, culture, and education. The logic behind such an arrangement is the following: scientific and technical progress, no matter what its inspiration was, leads to new business solutions, which in turn are implemented in economy. Changes in business functioning necessitate changes in the forms, methods, and organization of labor. Changes in the style of work, reinforced by availability of new products and services, change human lifestyles. Simultaneously, new technical solutions, economic changes, as well as work and lifestyle changes influence the organization of societies and social institutions. Culture and education become the key elements of participation in the global information society. Culture, because, as newer before, it is becoming a tradable good and a condition of economic success on the one hand, and plays a special role in preserving national identity under the circumstances of globalization on the other. Education, in its turn, is becoming a factor that conditions one's participation in the global information society, because life-long education makes one capable of keeping pace with development, which is an immanent feature of the global information society.

Prof. Wojciech Cellary is a computer scientist, a head of the Department of Information Technology at the Poznan University of Economics. His research interests are currently focused on electronic business and information society. In his professional career he worked at nine universities in Poland, France, and Italy. He is an author of 10 books and 90 scientific papers. He gives lectures on electronic business to over 600 students per year. He was a leader of many scientific and industrial projects. His newest achievement is edition of the report "Poland Emerging as a Member of the Global Information Society'' elaborated under auspices of United Nations Development Programme.

Amazon.com's former Chief Scientist will discuss in this tutorial a range of topics relevant for e-business, including:
* Business models and strategy in e-commerce;
* Sources of data,
* Design of experiments,
* Characterization of sessions and customers,
* Recommendation systems,
* Reputation systems.

The tutorial closes with a discussion on consumer decision making and behavioral economics.

Andreas Weigend has a unique career bridging between the disciplines of computer science, statistics and business in the areas of data mining, machine learning, and time series prediction. His recent work focuses on behavioral modeling of online customers and of financial traders.

As Amazon.com's Chief Scientist, he oversaw research in data mining, statistical learning, and computational marketing. In 1999, he co-founded Moodlogic and built the prototype for the system that was voted "best music organizer" by CINET in 2003. He also was the Chief Scientist of ShockMarket Corporation, funded by D. E. Shaw and Deutsche Bank to create information products and trading models based on real-time data from online brokerages, leveraging principles of behavioral finance.

He has published more than one hundred scientific papers and co-authored six books, including Time Series Prediction (1993) and Computational Finance (1999). He teaches Data Mining and Electronic Business at Stanford University, as well as executive courses on e-commerce and quantitative methods. Previously, he was full-time faculty at New York University's Stern School of Business and at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

He serves on the advisory boards of several startups and hedge funds, and has consulted for Acxiom, Bank of America, Bertelsmann Venture Capital, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Nikko Securities, Siemens, UBS, and others. Details are at www.weigend.com.

Andreas Weigend studied electrical engineering, physics, and philosophy at Karlsruhe, Cambridge (Trinity College), and Bonn University. He received a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 1991. He was a researcher at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and at the Santa Fe Institute.