After Twenty-Five Years of User Modeling and Adaptation...What Makes us UMAP?

Abstract

ACM UMAP 2017 is the 25th conference on User Modeling, on Adaptive Hypermedia, or on both together (since 2009). The research has actually been going on for more than 25 years as initially there was a conference only every two years. This keynote offers both reflection on the past and outlook into the future, with the burning question: What makes us UMAP? We perform research on modeling users (individuals as well as groups), not just for fun but to use these models for recommendations and for adaptation. That's not unique to us. In recommender systems analyzing user behavior is needed in order to give better and better recommendations, and likewise an area like educational data mining analyzes how learners study in order to best guide them to new learning material or followup courses. With analysis of social networks and website adaptation we step into the same research area that is covered by the hypertext community. If all of this is "us" but "not just us", where is our identity? One key characteristic of User Modeling is our quest to come up with understandable user models, or scrutable as Judy Kay coins them. The same is true for the adaptation: we strive to understand why certain adaptation happens or why a certain recommendation is given. UMAP research is not complete if we cannot understand the chain that leads from user action to (a perhaps much later) system reaction. As we move from expert-driven adaptation towards data-driven adaptation the problem of understanding the user-modeling-to-adaptation process is becoming harder and harder. But we need this understanding to ensure that adaptation continues to adapt in the right way under continuously changing circumstances (both in what we adapt and in the users and context we adapt to). We need the understanding also to prevent continuous adaptation from creating filter bubbles and to avoid creating the illusion that the recommendations will always be "right" because of the "wisdom of the crowd" principle. One key element has always been missing from UMAP, and this keynote will fill that void: we need to practice what we preach. Therefore, the conference proceedings will only contain this abstract, but there will be a real paper to go with this abstract. That paper cannot be printed because it is adaptive. The URL of the keynote paper is http://gale.win.tue.nl/keynote/.