Author Description

The study of the?eld of user modeling (UM) has resulted in signi'cant amounts of theoretical work, as well as practical experience, in developing UM-based applications in traditional areas of human-computer interaction and tutoring systems. Further, it promises to have an enormous impact on recent developments in areas like information?ltering, 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'needs. TechniquesforUMhavebeendevelopedandevaluatedbytheoreticiansandpractitioners in a variety of?elds, including arti'cial intelligence, education, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and human-computer interaction. The International Conferences on User Modeling constitute the major forum for pres- tationanddiscussionofboththelatestdevelopmentsinacademicresearchonallaspects of user modeling and industrial experience in deploying adaptive systems in real-world applications. This volume contains the proceedings of the Eighth International C- ference on User Modeling (UM2001), held in Sonthofen, Germany. It follows UM99 (Banff, Canada), UM97(Sardinia, Italy), UM96(Hawaii, USA), UM94(Hyannis, USA), UM92(Dagstuhl, WestGermany), UM90(Hawaii, USA)andUM86(MariaLaach, West Germany). Until now, the proceedings of the conference have been published with university p- lishers.AfterdiscussionswithinUMInc., itwasdecidedfromnowontopublishthep- ceedingsvolumewithoneofthemajorpublishingcompanies, toensurewideravailability of the volume in libraries and archives. After careful consideration Springer-Verlag was chosen. The UM2001 program includes tutorials, invited talks, technical paper and poster s- sions, a doctoral consortium, workshops, and system demonstrations. There were a total of 79 technical submissions from 20 countries.