User Modeling Servers

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.

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.

The refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on User Modeling, UM 2003, held in Johnstown, PA, USA in June 2003. The 20 revised full papers and 28 revised poster papers presented together with 12 abstracts were carefully reviewed and selected from 106 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on adaptive hypermedia, adaptive Web, natural language and dialogue, plan recognition, evaluation, emerging issues of user modeling, group modeling and cooperation, applications, student modeling, learning environments - natural language and paedagogy, and mobile and ubiquitous computing.

Ubiquitous user modeling differs from generic user modeling by three additional concepts: ongoing modeling, ongoing sharing, and ongoing exploitation. Systems that share their user models will improve the coverage, the level of detail, and the reliability of the integrated user models and thus allow better functions of adaptation. Ubiquitous user modeling implies new challenges of interchangeability, scalability, scrutability, and privacy. This volume presents results of a series of workshops on the topic of Ubiquitous User Modeling since 2003 and additional workshops at various other conferences e.g. on User Modeling and Adaptive Hypermedia in the last four years. The 8 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from the best lectures given at the workshops and were significantly extended to be included in the book.

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.

User-adaptive (or "personalized") systems take individual character istics of their current users into account and adapt their behavior ac cordingly. Several empirical studies demonstrate their benefits in areas like education and training, online help for complex software, dynamic information delivery, provision of computer access to people with dis abilities, and to some extent information retrieval. Recently, personal ized systems have also started to appear on the World Wide Web where they are primarily used for customer relationship management. The aim hereby is to provide value to customers by serving them as individuals and by offering them a unique personal relationship with the business. Studies show that web visitors indeed spend considerably more time at personalized than at regular portals and view considerably more web pages. Personalized sites in general also draw more visitors and turn more visitors into buyers. Personalization therefore would look like a win-win technology for both consumers and online businesses. However, it has a major down side: in order to be able to exhibit personalized behavior, user-adaptive systems have to collect considerable amounts of personal data and "lay them in stock" for possible future usage. Moreover, the collection of information about the user is often performed in a relatively inconspic uous manner (such as by monitoring users' web navigation behavior), in order not to distract users from their tasks.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20 th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization, held in Montreal, Canada, in July 2012. The 22 long and 7 short papers of the Research Paper Track presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 101 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on user engagement; trust; user motivation, attention, and effort; recommender systems (including topics such as matrix factorization, critiquing, noise and spam in recommender systems); user centered design and evaluation; educational data mining; modeling learners; user models in microblogging; and visualization. The Industry Paper Track covered innovative commercial implementations or applications of UMAP technologies, and experience in applying recent research advances in practice. 2 long and 1 short papers were accepted of 5 submissions.