Personalized and adaptive systems employ user models to adapt content, services, interaction or navigation to individual users’ needs. User models can be inferred from implicitly observed information, such as the user’s interaction history or current location, or from explicitly entered information, such as user profile data or ratings. Applications of personalization include item recommendation, location-based services, learning assistance and the tailored selection of interaction modalities. With the transition from desktop computers to mobile devices and ubiquitous environments, the need for adapting to changing contexts is even more important. However, this also poses new challenges concerning privacy issues, user control, transparency, and explainability. In addition, user experience and other human factors are becoming increasingly important. This book describes foundations of user modeling, discusses user interaction as a basis for adaptivity, and showcases several personalization approaches in a variety of domains, including music recommendation, tourism, and accessible user interfaces.

Adaptive Hypermedia has emerged as an important area of both academic and deployed research. It encompasses a broad range of research that will enable personalized, adaptive hypermedia systems to play an even more e?ective role in people's lives. The Web has enabled the widespread use of many person- ized systems, such as recommenders, personalized ?lters and retrieval systems, e-learning systems and various forms of collaborative systems. Such systems have been widely deployed in diverse domains such as e-Commerce, e-Health, e-Government, digital libraries, personalized travel planning as well as tourist and cultural heritage services. They are particularly promising for users with special needs. The exciting possibilities of such deployed adaptive hypermedia systems rely on research progress in a broad range of areas such as: user pro- ing and modeling; acquisition, updating and management of user models; group modeling and community-based pro?ling;recommender systems and recomm- dation strategies; data mining for personalization; the Semantic Web; adaptive multimedia content authoring and delivery; ubiquitous computing environments and Smart Spaces; personalization for the plethora of mobile devices, such as PDAs, mobile phones and other hand-held devices; and pragmatics such as p- vacy, trust and security. Empirical studies of adaptive hypermedia and Web systems are also critical to informing future directions. The AdaptiveHypermediaconferenceshavebecomethe majorforumsforthe scienti?c exchange and presentation of research results on adaptive hypermedia and adaptive Web-based systems.

At first sight, browsing the World Wide Web is a fairly intuitive and simple activity, but it turns out that users often experience difficulties in finding the information and services that they are looking for - or in returning to items that they have visited before. In order to improve the current design of Web sites and Web browsers, or to provide users with personalized interfaces, one needs to know how users interact with the Web. Although theoretical models and empirical data exist, the knowledge that they provide is limited and scattered. In this book, we integrate current insights and extend this body of knowledge with a number of user studies. Several methods are presented for obtaining, clearing, analyzing and visualizing Web usage data. Various aspects of user navigation styles are discussed. Particular attention is given to the issue why, when and how often users return to Web pages, and how browsers can support this more effectively. An important observation is that the Web has evolved from a hypermedia system to a hybrid between hypermedia and interactive applications. This book targets researchers and professionals who want to better understand and support the users that visit their Web sites or that make use of their applications and tools.