Abstract. This chapter presents the recommendation techniques applied in Personal Program Guide (PPG). This is a system generating personalized Electronic Program Guides for Digital TV. The PPG manages a user model that stores the estimates of the individual user’s preferences for TV program categories. This model results from the integration of different preference acquisition modules that handle explicit user preferences, stereotypical information about TV viewers, and information about the user’s viewing behavior. The observation of the individual viewing behavior is particularly easy because the PPG runs on the set-top box and is deeply integrated with the TV playing and the video recording services offered by that type of device. 1.

With the expansion of digital networks and TV devices, people are exposed to an information overload, due to the presence of several hundreds of alternative programs to watch. Therefore, personalized TV listings services are needed to support the search for relevant options.

Abstract. This paper presents the recommendation techniques applied in Personal Program Guide (PPG), a system generating personalized Electronic Program Guides for digital TV. The PPG recommends TV programs by relying on the integration of heterogeneous user modeling techniques.