Adaptive web sites: an AI challenge

The creation of a complex web site is a thorny problem in user interface design. First, different visitors have distinct goals. Second, even a single visitor may have different needs at different times. Much of the information at the site may also be dynamic or time-dependent. Third, as the site grows and evolves, its original design may no longer be appropriate. Finally, a site may be designed for a particular purpose but used in unexpected ways. Web servers record data about user interactions and accumulate this data over time. We believe that AI techniques can be used to examine user access logs in order to automatically improve the site. We challenge the AI community to create adaptive web sites: sites that automatically improve their organization and presentation based on user access data. Several unrelated research projects in plan recognition, machine learning, knowledge representation, and user modeling have begun to explore aspects of this problem. We hope that posing this challenge explicitly will bring these projects together and stimulate fundamental AI research. Success would have a broad and highly visible impact on the web and the AI community.