Personalized and adaptive systems employ user models to adapt content, services, interaction or navigation to individual users’ needs. User models can be inferred from implicitly observed information, such as the user’s interaction history or current location, or from explicitly entered information, such as user profile data or ratings. Applications of personalization include item recommendation, location-based services, learning assistance and the tailored selection of interaction modalities. With the transition from desktop computers to mobile devices and ubiquitous environments, the need for adapting to changing contexts is even more important. However, this also poses new challenges concerning privacy issues, user control, transparency, and explainability. In addition, user experience and other human factors are becoming increasingly important. This book describes foundations of user modeling, discusses user interaction as a basis for adaptivity, and showcases several personalization approaches in a variety of domains, including music recommendation, tourism, and accessible user interfaces.

Software systems that adapt their services to characteristics of individual users have already proven to be more effective and/or usable than non-adaptive systems. User-adaptive systems rely on user modeling systems for exhibiting personalized behavior. Quite a few user modeling systems have been developed during the past fifteen years. The decisions as to what useful services/functionalities of these systems are were mostly based on intuition and/or experience gained from studying the literature of a few user-adaptive applications. Results from neighboring disciplines and commercial developments have been largely ignored. Empirical evaluations of the practical applicability of user modeling systems were hardly ever carried out. This book is different: the author takes an interdisciplinary and application-oriented approach, defines meaningful requirements on user modeling servers, gives an overview of existing systems, pinpoints their deficiencies, develops a very novel architecture for user modeling servers, implements it, and tests its utility both within an application project and in empirically founded performance experiments. His excellent synthesis of scientific and industrial concerns (which rests on research in data bases, distributed systems, human-computer interaction, user modeling, statistics, and e-commerce) and his very convincing solutions make this book a worthwhile reading both for researchers and for industrial practitioners.

User modeling researchers look for ways of enabling interactive software systems to adapt to their users-by constructing, maintaining, and exploiting user models, which are representations of properties of individual users. User modeling has been found to enhance the effectiveness and/or usability of software systems in a wide variety of situations. Techniques for user modeling have been developed and evaluated by researchers in a number of fields, including artificial intelligence, education, psychology, linguistics, human-computer interaction, and information science. The biennial series of International Conferences on User Modeling provides a forum in which academic and industrial researchers from all of these fields can exchange their complementary insights on user modeling issues. The published proceedings of these conferences represent a major source of information about developments in this area.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization, held in Trento, Italy, on June 22-26, 2009. This annual conference was merged from the biennial conference series User Modeling, UM, and the conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems, AH. The 53 papers presented together with 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 125 submissions. The tutorials and workshops were organized in topical sections on constraint-based tutoring systems; new paradigms for adaptive interaction; adaption and personalization for Web 2.0; lifelong user modelling; personalization in mobile and pervasive computing; ubiquitous user modeling; user-centred design and evaluation of adaptive systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on User Modeling, UM 2001, held in Sonthofen, Germany in July 2001.The 19 revised full papers and 20 poster summaries presented together with summaries of 12 selected student presentations were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The book offers topical sections on acquiring user models from multi-modal user input; learning interaction models; user models for natural language interpretation, processing, and generation; adaptive interviewing for acquiring user preferences and product customization; supporting user collaboration through adaptive agents; student modeling; and adaptive information filtering, retrieval, and browsing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on User Modeling, UM 2007, held in Corfu, Greece in July 2007. Coverage includes evaluating user/student modeling techniques, data mining and machine learning for user modeling, user adaptation and usability, modeling affect and meta-cognition, as well as intelligent information retrieval, information filtering and content personalization.