UM 99

This tutorial has two main goals:

1. For attendees who have relatively little experience with user-adaptive systems, it can serve as an introductory overview of the main application areas, issues, methods, and results of research on such systems.
2. Experienced researchers will gain an increased awareness of relevant methods and results from outside of their own area of specialization. In particular, research will be included that isn't usually associated with the name "user modeling", though it involves adaptation to the individual user.

The tutorial will consider in turn six questions that can be asked about any user-adaptive system:

1. What function is served by the adaptation?
2. What properties of the user are modeled?
3. What input data about the user are obtained?
4. What techniques are employed to construct the model of theuser - if any such model is constructed?
5. What techniques are used to determine the appropriate adaptation to the user?
6. What is the system's empirical basis?

For each question, we will compare the main types of answer that have been worked out so far, discussing their strengths and limitations. The discussion will be illustrated throughout with concrete examples of existing systems. Among others, the papers that will be presented at UM99 will be mentioned as examples, so that the tutorial can serve as an advance organizer for the conference.

In order for the field of user modeling to advance from an art to more of a science, UM researchers must validate the effectiveness of UM systems. This tutorial will introduce UM researchers to the basic knowledge needed to perform the human-interaction experiments that are needed to validate UM systems. It should be accessible to anyone with basic knowledge of user modeling. No background in experimental psychology or statistics is needed. Topics will include experiment design, practical points of running experiments, data analysis, and avoiding pitfalls. The emphasis will be on the application of these topics to the evaluation of UM systems.