Bio: Dr Alfred Kobsa is a Professor in the School of Information and Computer Science 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.

Research: User modeling and personalized systems (with applications in the areas of information environments, expert finders, and user interfaces for disabled and elderly people), privacy, and in information visualization.