A personalised conference programme advisor

Academic and non-academic conferences present not only a difficult scheduling problem to the organiser, but also a session selection problem to the participant. Most support has been directed towards assisting the organiser in scheduling the programme. This paper describes an innovative yet simple application that offers limited decision support for participants to choose a beneficial session attendance plan for themselves, given the conference programme. It does this by eliciting keyword preferences using an Internet-based approach, matching these with papers to produce a customised programme. The paper describes and evaluates the design and pilot implementation of the application and reflects on its strength, limitations and systemic tensions between participants' and organisers' needs. The effectiveness of the application is not proven, but the experiment does generate a discussion about what factors influence participant attendance at conference sessions and how such an application could be further developed.