Report on the KDD2000 panel personalization and data mining: exploring the synergies

There has been much interest developed recently in personalization both in the industry and academia as witnessed by several Personalization Summits (the latest being held in November 2000 [1]) and by the publication of a recent Special Issue of CACM on personalization [2]. Personalization companies focus on building customer profiles, providing recommendations to the customers and delivering personalized content and other services. However, there is still no consensus reached in the industry and academia what personalization really means. To address this issue, the Panel Chair asked several personalization experts to provide their views on what personalization means to them, discuss possible connections between personalization and data mining, and examine how data mining can contribute to personalization and vice versa.