User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization 17th International Conference, UMAP 2009, formerly UM and AH, Trento, Italy, June 22-26, 2009, Proceedings

Research on user modeling (UM) and personalization can be traced back to the early1970s,butitwasnotuntilthemid-1980sthatthecommunityofresearchers working on user modeling and user-adaptive systems started its own series of - ternational meetings on UM. After three international workshops in 1986, 1990, and 1992, User Modeling was transformed into an increasingly prominent bi- nial international conference. Its sustainability was ensured by User Modeling Inc. (http://www. um. org), a professional organization of researchers that has solicited and selectedbids to run the conference,nominated programchairs,and provided ?nancial backing to UM conferences. Between 1986 and 2007, 11 UM conferences were held (including the three workshops just mentioned), bringing together researchers from many areas and stimulating the development of the ?eld. Since the early 1990s, the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and other new platforms has populated the lives of an increasing number of people with a great variety of computing systems. This rampant growth has tended to increase the need for personalization,a topic that more and more researchersand practiti- ers are addressing and that has given rise to several new conferences. Among them,anotherbiennialseriesonAdaptiveHypermediaandAdaptiveWeb-Based Systems (Adaptive Hypermedia or AH for short) quickly established itself as a majorforumandsistereventtoUM,running onalternateyearswithit. Between 2000and 2008,?veAH conferenceswere held. During this period, the increasing complexity and prominence of Web systems prompted the enlargement of the list of topics covered by the AH series.