There is a growing interest in providing technology-mediated lifelong learning services for ALL. Although an increasing number of the users interested in these services are adult learners and people with disabilities most available settings do not consider accessibility requirements.
The lifelong learning paradigm recognizes that, in a knowledge based society, education and work are integrated throughout people’s lives. In this context, technology is expected to attend the learning needs of the students in a personalized way. This personalized support is to be provided by web intelligence and intelligent agent technology. This paradigm, of increasing importance in current knowledge-based societies, has particularities that make not possible reusing existing solutions from other fields. For instance, users (learners in this case) are moved by objectives and thus more motivated in the activities performed. Efficiency (learning efficiency) is critical, since usually people require getting some skills of knowledge to be immediately applied. Moreover, they usually have no alternative for the technology used since currently is the educational institution the responsible for its selection. These and other features offer new challenges to the Web Intelligence and/or Intelligent Agent Technology that are to be explored in the workshop. Thus, it is a hot research issue how apply the wide variety of web intelligence techniques to consider the functional diversity of users so that their accessibility needs are met.
Towards User Modelling and Adaptive Systems for All (TUMAS-A 2008) workshop is held in conjunction with the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM Joint International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology that will take place on December 9-12, 2008 at the University Technology Sydney (Australia).
The workshop follows on from the previous TUMAS-A 2007 workshop held in conjunction with the User Modelling 2007 conference. Current edition focuses on the application of Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology in eLearning to support the needs for all in the lifelong learning paradigm.
The workshop will be an important part of events of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology which has been ranked at top 15 from 620 Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning conferences in Computer Science Conference ranking
Submissions of original on-going works and previously unpublished research related to the main conference topics are requested (see Workshop Topics section).
