User modeling researchers look for ways of enabling interactive software systems to adapt to their users-by constructing, maintaining, and exploiting user models, which are representations of properties of individual users. User modeling has been found to enhance the effectiveness and/or usability of software systems in a wide variety of situations. Techniques for user modeling have been developed and evaluated by researchers in a number of fields, including artificial intelligence, education, psychology, linguistics, human-computer interaction, and information science. The biennial series of International Conferences on User Modeling provides a forum in which academic and industrial researchers from all of these fields can exchange their complementary insights on user modeling issues. The published proceedings of these conferences represent a major source of information about developments in this area.

Today's always-available interactive computing technology can be exploited in many ways to help people make good choices in everyday life-about options such as products or health-related behaviors but also about the use of computing technology itself. In contrast to persuasive technology, where it is known in advance what option is supposed to be chosen, this book focuses on systems that help people choose for themselves. Realizing this potential requires a well-founded understanding of the ways in which people make everyday choices and the design strategies and computing technologies that can be used to support these processes. It offers a compact synthesis of research on these topics that is specifically formulated to be accessible, useful, and memorable to researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction. It is illustrated with examples that concern the choices that people make while using interactive computing technology, focusing especially on choices concerning contributions to online communities and on privacy-related choices. Extensive references enable readers to consult the original research literature on topics of special interest to them.