CWI and Chinese online news provider Xinhuanet signed a cooperation agreement to develop a user experience research program. Jos Baeten (director CWI) and Tian Shubin (Xinhuanet CEO) signed the agreement last week at the China Holland Business Summit 2014 in Beijing. This summit was part of a trade mission to China headed by the Mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard van der Laan.
CWI will be helping Xinhuanet to build the first advanced user experience laboratory in China. Both institutions will explore the use of sensor technology to better assess the user experience during media consumption. Offering rich, personalized media content is a major research topic in the creative industry. The Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group at CWI, a major international player on user experience research, will help improve Xinhuanet’s media offerings. Traditional evaluation methodologies like questionnaires do not always lead to accurate and reliable results. By using biosensors, like skin conductance sensors, the level of attention of the users can be reliably measured. Collecting and analysing this data provide Xinhuanet with valuable insights for applications ranging from media content to remote teaching and precision marketing.
Mayor Van der Laan called the cooperation “a very interesting example of the potential for creative cooperation between the Netherlands and China,” Tian Shubin, CEO of Xinhuanet says about the project: “We believe that CWI will enable us to make the transformation towards converged media content, providing our users with a richer experience and better products and services,” Jos Baeten of CWI told the Chinese media: “China and the Netherlands have an excellent cooperation in science and technology. Xinhuanet is a very influential website and I am looking forward to our cooperation.”
Xinhuanet is the online news provider of Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese national press agency and is headquartered in Beijing. The agency has reporters in over a 100 countries worldwide and serves both national and international audiences. It owns more than 30 newspapers and magazines in six languages and publishes more than 4500 news items daily, most prominently on news website Xinhuanet.com
Image: Jos Baeten and Tian Shubin sign the cooperation agreement at the China Holland Business Summit (Xinhuanet.com)
