Intellimedia systems as well as adaptable and adaptive hypermedia systems constitute another active research area. For example, in the project AC185 AVANTI (AdaptiVe and Adaptable Interactions for Multimedia Telecommunications Applications) of ACTS , the EU programme in Advanced Communications Technologies and Services, aspects of user modeling in distributed information systems are explicitly considered. There is also a trend towards a standardization of user modeling shell systems in order to facilitate the commercial exploitation of user modeling techniques.
Interestingly enough, applications in office machines and consumer electronics receive growing interest from researchers and industrial practitioners.
(New Nov. 96) A new interesting area for applying sophisticated user modeling techniques is the slow-starting but potentially huge market of companies that want to sell goods and services on the World Wide Web. The flexible generation of customer profiles constitutes a key issue for building user adaptive catalogs that provide dynamic product displays. Recently, high-tech companies engaging in electronic commerce have begun to explore the use of Artificial Intelligence methods to guide the appropriate selection of displays depending on different product characteristics on the one hand and desired attributes for purchased items on the other hand.
(New Feb. 97) The great success of Internet/intranet technologies has led to a rapidly growing amount of information becoming available on corporate networks and the World Wide Web. As effective access to heterogeneous information sources is of prime importance, intelligent information filtering has evolved into a prominent field for research and development activities. Reflecting the needs and the high market potential of this applications area, a current tendency in user modeling is a stronger bias on intelligent, adaptive agents for information retrieval.
(New Aug. 97) UM-97, the latest event of the major international conference series in the field of user modeling, indicates a very strong European position within this area of research. As the numerous accepted contributions from Europe show, all major subareas for the application of user modeling, like information retrieval, information presentation, instruction and training, and interface adaptation, are covered by outstanding research activities. Compared with the USA, there is a specific European dominance regarding research devoted to an important aspect of interface adaptation, namely tailoring a system to abilities, disabilities, and preferences of its user. Another hot topic of current research relates to empirical evaluations of systems in order to provide the necessary empirical foundations for user modeling techniques.