Paradigm Shifts in User Modeling: A Journey from Historical Foundations to Emerging Trends

The presented tutorial aims to serve as a comprehensive roadmap for the UMAP community into the current user modeling research, focusing on the paradigm shifts that have transformed the research landscape in recent times. We will provide a complete overview of the large, long-standing, and ever-growing research fields of user modeling and user profiling, both from a historical and a technical point of view. We will then examine the definitions associated with each key term in this research domain, aiming to eliminate ambiguity and confusion in their usage. As the core of our tutorial, we present in-depth the paradigm shifts that have occurred in recent years, especially due to technological evolution, as well as the current research directions and novel trends in the field. In particular, we illustrate and discuss the advances in the following topics: implicit and explicit user profiling, user behavior modeling, user representation, and beyond-accuracy perspectives. The audience will be engaged in discussions during the whole presentation to foster the development of an interactive event. Detailed information and resources about the tutorial are available on the website: https://link.erasmopurif.com/tutorial-umap24.