User modeling is a cross-disciplinary research field that attempts to construct models of human behavior within a specific computer environment. Contrary to traditional artificial intelligence research, the goal is not to imitate human behavior as such, but to make the machine able to understand the expectations, goals, knowledge, information needs, and desires of a user in terms of a specific computing environment. The computer representation of this information about a user is called a user model, and systems that construct and utilize such models are called user modeling systems. A simple example of a user model would be an e-commerce site which makes use of the user’s and similar users’ purchasing and browsing behavior in order to better understand the user’s preferences. In this class, the focus is on obtaining a general understanding of user modeling, and an understanding of how to apply user modeling techniques. Students will read seminal papers in the user modeling literature, as well as complete a course project where students build a system that explicitly models the user.
Knowledge of probability