Editorial note

Authors: Alfred Kobsa

Publish Date: 2016/10/31

Volume: 26, Issue: 5, Pages: 521-522

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Abstract

This is my last issue as the editorinchief of this journal After serving for 26 years in this position it is time to pass on the baton It was an exciting ride When I founded the journal user modeling and useradapted interaction was an obscure research effort in the intersection of naturallanguage systems intelligent tutoring systems and human–computer interaction At that time many office workers still used dumb terminals connected to a mainframe and home computers were rare And no WorldWide Web of course The idea that computers ought to build a model of the knowledge and abilities of each user and adapt to them individually was for sure a bit quixoticTwentyfive years later three fourths of computer users demand personalization from websites and mobile apps 20–30 of Amazon purchases and 70 of Netflix view are the result of personalized recommendations millions of students have used adaptive learning software that models their knowledge and instructs the students on the topics they are most ready to learn and a hundred million users per month listen to music that is individually selected for them based on their listening behaviorResearch published in UMUAI enjoys wide dissemination and impact 8684 institutions had online access to the journal in 2015 and 43063 fulltext articles have been downloaded The journal is topranked along several citationtoarticles measures in the fields of Human–Computer Interaction Education and Computer Science Applications UMUAI is also highly ranked in several national journal rankings Last but not least 92 of authors who publish in UMUAI state that it is likely they will publish with Springer againThe new editorinchief Judith Masthoff from the University of Aberdeen Scotland has all the credentials and energy to move the journal forward Judith has been on the journal editorial board for five years and has published four articles in the journal as well as a special issue on Personalization and Behavior Change in 2014 She was also a program chair of the UMAP conference in 2012 and is a director of User Modeling Inc Her areas of expertise span recommender systems persuasive computing affective computing language learning and language generation patient support systems and human–computer interaction

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