Workshops

This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from the areas of user modeling and personalization, recommender systems, education, data mining, learning analytics, intelligent tutoring systems and other related disciplines, to explore the use of recommender systems in education, share their experience and discuss the challenges and open research topics in the design and deployment of effective solutions.
Recommender Systems are an emerging technology in education and they have a huge potential. Our workshop will provide a dedicated forum to discuss the possibilities, solutions and challenges, bringing together researchers and practitioners from different areas.

Research in the areas of User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization faces a number of significant scientific challenges. One of the most significant of these challenges is the issue of comparative evaluation. It has always been difficult to rigorously compare different approaches to personalization, as the function of the resulting systems is, by their nature, heavily influenced by the behaviour of the users involved in trialling the systems. To-date this topic has received relatively little attention. Developing comparative evaluations in this space would be a huge advancement as it would enable shared comparison across research, which to-date has been very limited.

State-of-the-art approaches in adaptation and personalization research consider user models that mostly maintain information regarding the “traditional” user characteristics (i.e., experience, knowledge, interests, context), and related contextual or technology aspects (i.e., displays, connectivity, processing power). While modeling these factors has shown significant improvements and benefits to the end-users in terms of usability and user experience, still the needs of today’s epoch signify the further engagement into research that will produce more holistic human-centered practices. The vision is to bring more inclusively the “human-in-the-loop”, considering intrinsic user characteristics and abilities, like perceptual, personality, visual, cognitive and emotional factors as expressed by the theories of individual differences. In addition, recent studies show the need of broadening the scope of diversity parameters to include characteristics such as motivation, self-actualization, and socio-cultural differences.

THUM is the merge of two related workshops originally proposed at UMAP 2017, namely HUM: Holistic User Modeling – Merging Quantified Self and Semantic Content Analytics and UMTempAspects: Workshop on Temporal Aspects in User Modelling.

The main goal of the workshop is to stimulate the discussion around problems, challenges and research directions regarding the exploitation of content-based information sources (Big, Social and Linked Data) along with Personal Information sources (gathered through personal devices) for personalization and adaptation task and to foster the design of a new generation of intelligent user-centered systems. The workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners working in order to look at the challenges from the point of view of the temporal and holistic aspects in user modelling.

Original UMTempAspects website

The 7th International Workshop on Personalization Approaches in Learning Environments (PALE) is to be held on July 9th, 2017 in Bratislava. We would like to share and discuss the new trends in current research on how user modeling and associated artificial intelligent techniques are able to contextualize and manage the increasing amount of information coming from the task at hand and its surrounding environment in order to provide the personalization support in a wide range of learning environments, which are increasingly more sensitive to the learners and their context.

The workshop is aimed at bringing together researchers and practitioners who are working on various aspects of cultural heritage and are interested in exploring the potential of state of the art of mobile technology (onsite as well as online) to enhance the CH visit experience. The expected result of the workshop is a multidisciplinary research agenda that will inform future research directions and hopefully, forge some research collaborations.

The phenomenon often referred to as the “filter-bubble,” i.e., the effect that collaborative, as well as content-based recommender systems keep making obvious, uninspiring, and therefore disengaging suggestions based on previous interactions, has emphasized the value of system qualities beyond pure accuracy, e.g., diversity, novelty, serendipity, or unexpectedness, to keep the user satisfied. In fact, these approaches to kicking the user out of his or her “comfort zone” seem to be highly promising methods to increase satisfaction with a system in the long run. To go even one step further, we also want to explore concepts along three qualities we refer to as surprise, opposition, and obstruction. Surprise relates to existing concepts like serendipity in complex scenarios. Opposition, as an extreme form of variation, is highly subjective and context-dependent. Obstruction refers to the intentional restriction of functionality through the machine in an active manner by “embodying opposition”.

Personalization of serious and persuasive games, as well as gameful interactions has become more important than ever in a wide range of areas (e.g., health, sustainability, education, and security). Thus, this full-day workshop at UMAP will mark an important milestone in this field by bringing together a specialized community of participants to explore new scientific contributions and consider the future of personalization. The workshop’s special focus will be on complementary approaches – the shades – of personalization: subjective vs. objective variables, continuous vs. categorical dimensions, personalization of the means vs. the ends of the interaction, personalization in real-time vs. at one point in time, which we expect to stimulate extensive discussions and inspire new research ideas.
Workshop participants will contribute with “pieces” (submissions of theoretical or empirical papers and demos) to build the basis for a new and unified framework for personalization of serious and persuasive games and gameful interactions.