Too close for comfort?: adapting to the user's cultural background

The cultural context of the user is a largely neglected aspect of human centered computing. This is because culture is a very fuzzy concept and even with a computational model of culture it remains difficult to derive the necessary information to recognize the user's cultural background. Such information is only indirectly available and has to be derived from the observable multimodal behavior of the user. We propose the usage of a dimensional model of culture that allows applying computational methods to derive a user's cultural background and to adjust the system's behavior accordingly. To this end, a Bayesian network is applied to allow for the necessary inferences despite the fact that the given knowledge about the user's behavior is incomplete and unreliable.

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