Before he was a Director of the Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD). Dr Kobsa's research focuses on user-adaptive information environments, user modeling, expert finders, multimedia educational software, information visualization, and user interfaces for handicapped and elderly people. He is the editor of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, editorial board member of 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 over a hundred publications in the areas of user-adaptive systems, human-computer interaction and knowledge representation.