Vorbemerkungen:
Die Benutzermodellierung ist ein wichtiges Anwendungsgebiet der Kognitionswissenschaft. Gerade waehrend der letzten paar Jahre hat die Entwicklung des WWW und des E-Commerce eine grosse Nachfrage nach Wissenschaftlern erzeugt, die sich auf diesem Gebiet auskennen. Bei den internationalen Tagungen der Reihe "UM" war die Teilnahme aus den deutschsprachigen Laendern und aus der GK schon immer relativ stark; und die naechste Tagung findet hier in Deutschland statt. Achtung: Der erste Einreichungstermin ist der 11. November.

The field of user modeling (UM) has resulted in significant amounts of theoretical work, as well as practical experience, in developing UM-based applications in traditional areas of human-computer interaction and tutoring systems. It also promises to have an enormous impact on recent developments in areas like information filtering, e-commerce, adaptive presentation techniques, and interface agents.

A user model is an explicit representation of properties of a particular user, which allows the system to adapt diverse aspects of its performance to individual users. Techniques for UM have been developed and evaluated by researchers in a number of fields, including artificial intelligence, education, psychology, linguistics, human-computer interaction. UM01 follows UM99 (Banff), UM97 (Sardinia), UM96 (Hawaii), UM94 (Hyannis), UM92 (Dagstuhl), UM90 (Hawaii) and UM86 (Maria Laach). It will offer tutorials, invited talks, paper and poster sessions, a doctoral consortium, workshops, and system demonstrations.

AREAS OF INTEREST include, but are not limited to:

• construction of user models: knowledge, beliefs and misconceptions, preferences, goals and plans, cognitive styles, user modeling agents and brokers
• exploitation of user models to achieve: adaptive information filtering and retrieval, tailored information presentation, transfer of task performance from user to system, selection of instructional actions, interface adaptation
• learning and inference techniques for UM, including: neural networks and other machine learning techniques, numerical uncertainty management, epistemic logic or other logic-based formalisms, stereotype or task hierarchies
• applications of UM techniques in various areas, such as: adaptive learning and on-line help environments, e-commerce, interface agents, explanation of system actions, adaptive hypermedia and multimodal interaction, support of collaboration, and support of users with special needs
• practical issues of UM, such as privacy, consistency, evaluation, standardization.

INVITED TALKS:

• Alfred Kobsa
  "User Modeling and Expert Finding"
• Joseph A. Konstan
  "Heavyweight Applications of Lightweight User Models:
  A Look at Collaborative Filtering, Recommender Systems, and Real-Time Personalization"
• Sandra Marshall
  "Eye Tracking: A Rich Source of Information for User Modeling"

SUBMISSIONS:
Submissions are invited that describe original academic or industrial research on some aspect of user modeling. Since Springer Verlag is the conference proceedings publisher, it is required that the submissions follow as closely as possible the Springer Lecture Notes format. The page limit for paper submissions is 10 pages and for posters - 3 pages. Detailed submission instructions (including those for workshops and tutorials) are available from the conference web site: http://www.dfki.de/um2001/.

DEADLINES:
Nov 4, 2000 - abstracts
Nov 11, 2000 - PAPERS
Nov 11, 2000 - informal workshop proposals
Nov 18, 2000 - tutorial proposals
Nov 18, 2000 - posters
Nov 25, 2000 - workshop proposals

CONFERENCE SITE:
The AlpenCongressCentrum is part of the Allgaeu Stern Hotel, located in Sonthofen, the southernmost city of Germany in the Bavarian Alps. It is easily accessible from several major European airports, for example, Munich, Zurich, and Frankfurt.

ORGANIZATION:

Conference Chair: Mathias Bauer, German Research Center for AI (DFKI)
Program Co-Chairs: Julita Vassileva, University of Saskatchewan, Canada Piotr Gmytrasiewicz, University of Texas at Arlington, USA
Organizing Chair: Marc Roessel, Atrada Trading Network AG

Program Committee:

Liliana Ardissono, Italy
David Benyon, UK
Ben du Boulay, UK
Peter Brusilovsky, USA
Susan Bull, Canada
Sandra Carberry, USA
David Chin, USA
Gerhard Fisher, USA
Abigail Gertner, USA
Brad Goodman, USA
Russ Greiner, Canada
Eric Horvitz, USA
Anthony Jameson, Germany
Paul Kamsteeg, Netherlands
Judy Kay, Australia
Alfred Kobsa, Germany
Neal Lesh, USA
Diane Litman, USA
Mark Maybury, USA
Michael McTear, UK
Antonija Mitrovic, New Zealand
Riichiro Mizoguchi, Japan
Ann Nicholson, Australia
Toshikazu Nishimura, Japan
Cecile Paris, Australia
Charles Rich, USA
Fiorella de Rosis, Italy
John Self, UK
Adelheit Stein, Germany
Carlo Tasso, Italy
Loren Terveen, USA
Wolfgang Wahlster, Germany
Ingrid Zukerman, Australia

SHORT BIOS OF INVITED SPEAKERS:

Alfred Kobsa is an Associate Professor at the Department of Information and Computer Science of the University of California, Irvine, and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Essen, Germany. Before he was a Director of the Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD). Dr Kobsa's research focuses on user-adaptive information environments, user modeling, expert finders, multimedia educational software, information visualization, and user interfaces for handicapped and elderly people. He is the editor of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, editorial board member of World-Wide Web and Universal Access in the Information Society, and was the founding president of User Modeling Inc. Dr. Kobsa edited several books and authored over a hundred publications in the areas of user-adaptive systems, human-computer interaction and knowledge representation.

Joseph A. Konstan is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches and conducts research on user interfaces and UI software systems. Together with colleague John Riedl, he leads the GroupLens Research Project, which is best known for its research on collaborative filtering recommender systems and for its MovieLens research system (www.movielens.org). Dr. Konstan is a co-founder of Net Perceptions, a leader in real-time personalization software, and he serves as an advisor or consultant to many software firms exploring user interfaces, user models, and personalization.

Dr. Sandra Marshall is President & CEO of EyeTracking, Inc., Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University, and Director of the SDSU Cognitive Ergonomics Research Facility. Her research in cognition and assessment has received federal funding for the past twenty years and has had important theoretical and practical impact. Her recent work has focused on the use of eye tracking in understanding cognitive activity in training and performance. In research sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and Air Force Office of Scientific Research, she developed new methods for assessing cognitive strategies and cognitive workload based on eye measures.

MORE INFORMATION is available at the (user-adaptive) conference website: http://www.dfki.de/um2001/"