With the growth of online information, many people are challenged in finding and reading the information most important for their interests. From 2008-2010 we built an experimental personalized news system where readers can subscribe to organized channels of information that are curated by experts. AI technology was employed to radically reduce the work load of curators and to efficiently present information to readers. The system has gone through three implementation cycles and processed over 16 million news stories from about 12,000 RSS feeds on over 8000 topics organized by 160 curators for over 600 registered readers. This paper describes the approach, engineering and AI technology of the system.

Abstract : In this paper the authors investigate the use of scene graphs as a general approach for implementing two-dimensional (2D) graphical applications, and in particular Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs). Scene graphs are typically found in three-dimensional (3D) graphics packages such as Sun's Java3D and SGI's OpenInventor. They have not been widely adopted by 2D graphical user interface toolkits. To explore the effectiveness of scene graph techniques, the authors have developed Jazz, a general-purpose 2D scene graph toolkit. Jazz is implemented in Java using Java2D, and runs on all platforms that support Java 2. This paper describes Jazz and the lessons we learned using Jazz for ZUIs. It also discusses how 2D scene graphs can be applied to other application areas. (5 figures, 27 refs.)