Coming of age: celebrating a quarter century of user modeling and personalization: Guest editors’ introduction

Abstract

When Alfred Kobsa and Wolfgang Wahlster hosted the first workshop on user modeling1 in 1986, few anticipated how important this field was to become during the next 25 years. That early workshop led to more workshops and then the User Modeling conference, which ultimately merged with the Adaptive Hypermedia conference in 2009 to become the User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization conference. In parallel to the evolution of the UMAP conference series, and also under the pioneering leadership of Alfred Kobsa, was the founding of the UMUAI journal, first appearing in 1991, originally published by Kluwer and now by Springer. This special issue of the UMUAI journal celebrates the first 25 years of user modeling research by providing invited (and in the UMUAI tradition also stringently reviewed) papers from leading experts on user modeling, adaptation, and personalization. The articles collectively provide a superb overview of research issues in user modeling that are the likely shape of the next decade of research, as well as an historical perspective of how these issues have evolved since the inception of the field. User modeling and user adapted interaction has not only grown as a research area, but has become a central applied issue for anybody interested in understanding users as they interact with technology. The foundational applications of learning systems (with student modeling to help systems adapt to learner differences) and natural language