Adapting News and Advertisements to Groups

This chapter deals with adaptation of background information and ­advertisements, displayed in an environment, to the interests of the group of people present. According to research on computational advertising, it is important to develop methods for finding the “best match” between user interests in a given context and available advertisements. Accordingly, after providing an overview of the most popular group recommender approaches, this chapter looks at new issues that arise when considering group modeling in pervasive advertising conveyed through digital displays. The chapter first discusses general issues concerning group recommender systems, with particular emphasis on the acquisition of user preferences and interests. A system called GAIN (Group Adaptive Information and News) is then presented. This was developed with the aim of tailoring the display of background information and advertisements to groups of people.