Special Double Issue on “User Modeling in Ubiquitous Computing”

By Anthony Jameson and Antonio Krüger (2005)

User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, 15(3/4).

Abstract

(From the guest editors’ introduction:) The field of user modeling has come up with many techniques for modeling and adapting to computer users, for example, to their preferences, goals, and intentions, as well as to their cognitive and affective states. Until relatively recently, these methods were restricted to desktop systems, in which the user’s external context could largely be neglected. With the increasing ubiquity of mobile and embedded devices, it has become clear that in many cases the recognition and modeling of the user’s external context is essential.

Coming from the other direction, ubiquitous computing has generated many approaches to recognizing and modeling a user’s context, for example his or her location, physical environment, and social environment. But in most cases there has been no explicit modeling of users themselves. Recently, an increasing number of researchers in this area have taken into account the fact that the external context alone may not determine the most appropriate adaptation to the user. So they have worked on methods for recognizing and adapting to aspects of the user such as their activities, general interests, and current information needs.

We believe that the field of user modeling can contribute significantly to the enhancement of the effectiveness and usability of ubiquitous computing systems. In turn, the field of ubiquitous computing, by building the technological basis for mobile and migrating systems, is offering the user modeling community opportunities to apply their methods to novel types of systems, extending the methods themselves in the process. The major conferences in both fields---the series User Modeling, Intelligent User Interfaces, Ubicomp and Pervasive, have seen several invited talks, technical sessions, and workshops during recent years that can be seen as relevant to both user modeling and ubiquitous computing. The time seems to be ripe to bring these two communities even closer together---hence this special issue.

Note

The table of contents, abstracts, and (for institutions with subscriptions) access to the papers are available via SpringerLink