Dr Alfred Kobsa is a Professor in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences of the University of California, Irvine. Before he was a Director of the Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD), and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Essen, Germany. He was also an Associate Professor of Information Systems at the Department of Information Science at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and a Senior Researcher at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Saarbrücken. He received his master degrees in Computer Science and in the Social and Economic Sciences from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Vienna, Austria and the Vienna University of Technology.
Dr Kobsa's research lies in the areas of user modeling and personalized systems, privacy, and in information visualization. He is the editor of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research, Associate Editor of the ACM Transaction on Intelligent Interactive Systems, editorial board member of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, World Wide Web and Universal Access in the Information Society, and was the founding president of User Modeling Inc. Dr. Kobsa edited several books and authored numerous publications in the areas of user-adaptive systems, human-computer interaction and knowledge representation. He also co-founded a national workshop series and an international conference series in these areas. He received research awards from the Humboldt Foundation, Google, and several other organizations.