The Past, the Present, and the Future

User modeling and adaptation had its inception as a field at a workshop in Maria Laach, Germany in 1986. Most of the work at that time focused on applications in natural language processing, such as adapting explanations to the user's level of expertise. Since then, the field has grown tremendously and new applications are arising each year. As appropriate for the 30th anniversary of the first workshop, this talk will discuss how the field has evolved, novel work that we are pursuing on applying user modeling and adaptation to information retrieval, insights into where the field is headed and the hottest topics for exploration, and some thoughts on the conflict between the benefits of user modeling and its intrusion on people's lives.