Modeling users interacting with smart devices

Personalizing users' experience and the ability to perform complex tasks on smart devices and environments such as smart speakers and smart homes are changing the way people are doing their daily tasks. Checking the weather and planning to visit a museum is as simple as asking your smart speaker at home to read out loud the weather condition and commanding the Intelligent Assistant integrated with the smart speaker to book a ticket to visit the museum. To improve user experience in physical spaces such as smart homes, museums, and cities while performing their daily tasks, effective modeling of users interacting with smart devices is required. The overall goal of this thesis is to improve users' experience in physical spaces such as smart cities and environments by modeling user interactions with smart devices. Smart devices hold the promise to bring the powerful tools of the online world into the physical world, and our results highlight similarities and differences with user interactions in traditional search and recommendation settings, and help promote the user experience while interacting with smart devices.