The UMAP 2016 Extended Proceedings (workshops, posters, demos, late-breaking results) are online at CEUR-WS.

Best Paper Award (sponsored by Springer)

Predicting Individual Differences for Learner Modeling in Intelligent Tutorsfrom Previous Learner Activities
by Michael Eagle, Albert Corbett, John Stamper and Bruce Mclaren and Ryan Baker

James Chen Best Student Paper Awards

On the Value of Reminders within E-Commerce Recommendations
by Lukas Lerche, Dietmar Jannach, Malte Ludewig

Analyzing and Predicting Task Reminders
by David Graus, Paul Bennett, Ryen White, Eric Horvitz

This is a personal conference scheduling tool with social linking and recommendation features. The aim of this application is to enhance your experience at the conference

You can access the Conference Navigator here.

In order for your work to receive the widest possible audience as well as obtain one-on-one feedback, each presenting author of a long OR short paper will have an opportunity to present their paper orally in one of the five plenary paper sessions AND present a poster of their work in one of the afternoon poster sessions on Thursday and Friday.

Guidelines for ORAL Presentations (Long AND Short papers)

• Full paper presentations are allotted 15 minutes (including everything). Please prepare for a 12 minute presentation (including setup time) + 3 minutes for questions.
• Short papers are allotted 10 minutes (including everything). Please prepare for a 8 minute presentation (including setup time) + 2 minutes for questions.
• Your talk should summarize your paper - not replace it. Try to convey the main idea and key results instead of reproducing every detail (people can get details from the paper and ask you questions at the poster session).
• Slides must be legible from the back of a large room. Typeface size on slides should be at least 24 points, or 20 points in exceptional cases.
  Use visuals and diagrams. Avoid excessive text and complete sentences.
• Use examples. Concrete examples are easier to grasp than abstract statements.
• Repeat each question so that everyone hears it, the questioner verifies that you understood it, and you get time to prepare your answer.

Guidelines for POSTER Presentations (Long AND Short papers)

• Please identify your assigned poster session (either on Thursday or Friday) from the online program.
• The poster boards are square, 4 x 4 feet (48 x 48 inches or 122 x 122 cm), so please size your posters accordingly.
• Posters must be visible from at least 6 feet away, so please use large typefaces (minimum of 32 points).
• Avoid overly "texty" posters. Use visuals and diagrams. Remember that the poster should convey the main ideas of your paper (not replace the paper).

Guidelines for Extended Abstract Posters; Regular Posters; Late Breaking Results Posters; and Doctoral Consortium Posters

• Your poster is scheduled for the opening reception on Wednesday evening.
• The poster boards are square, 4 x 4 feet (48 x 48 inches or 122 x 122 cm), so please size your posters accordingly.
• Posters must be visible from at least 6 feet away, so please use large typefaces (minimum of 32 points).
• Avoid overly "texty" posters. Use visuals and diagrams. Remember that the poster should convey the main ideas of your paper (not replace the paper)

User Personality and Chat Room Behavior in Synchronous Online Learning
- by Wen Wu (Hong Kong Baptist University); Li Chen (Hong Kong Baptist University); Qingchang Yang (Hong Kong Baptist University)

Exploring Contingent Step Decomposition in a Tutorial Dialogue System
- by Pamela Jordan (University of Pittsburgh); Patricia Albacete (University of Pittsburgh); Sandra Katz (University of Pittsburgh)

Individual and Comparison Open Learner Model Visualisations to Identify What to Work On Next
- by Susan Bull (University College London); Peter Brusilovsky (University of Pittsburgh); Julio Guerra (University of Pittsburgh); Rafael Araujo (Federal University of Uberlândia)

What’s Inside the Box? An Open Student Modeling Approach in a Museum Context
- by Diego Zapata-Rivera (Educational Testing Service)

A Comparative Study of Visual Cues for Annotation-Based Navigation Support in Adaptive Educational Hypermedia
- by Roya Hosseini (University of Pittsburgh); Peter Brusilovsky (University of Pittsburgh)

POSTERS

Multilingual Tagging Behaviour: the role of recommender systems
- by Angelina Ziesemer (PUCRS); Jamie Blustein (Dalhousie University); Milene Silveira ((PUCRS)

Diagnosis at Scale: Detecting the Expertise Level and Knowledge States of Lifelong Professional Learners
- by Oluwabukola Ishola (University of Saskatchewan); Gord McCalla (University of Saskatchewan)

Personality profiling from text: language features tied to personality across corpora
- by William Wright (University of Hawaii at Manoa); David Chin (University of Hawaii at Manoa)

Pupillary Response: Removing Screen Luminosity Effects for Clearer Implicit Feedback
- by Tomas Juhaniak (Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava); Patrik Hlaváč, Robert Moro (Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava); Jakub Simko (Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava); Maria Bielikova (Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava)

Supporting Group Decision Making with Recommendations and Explanations
- by Thuy Ngoc Nguyen (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano); Francesco Ricci (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)

DEMO

CogniWin: An Integrated Framework to Support Older Adults at Work
- by David Portugal (CITARD Services Ltd.); Marios Belk (University of Cyprus and CITARD Services Ltd.); Sten Hanke (Austrian Institute of Technology); Markus Müllner-Rieder (Austrian Institute of Technology); Miguel Sales Dias (Microsoft Language Development Center); João Quintas (Instituto Pedro Nunes); Christoph Glauser (ArgYou AG); Eleni Christodoulou (CITARD Services Ltd.); George Samaras (University of Cyprus and CITARD Services Ltd.); Mehdi Snene (University of Geneva); Dimitri Konstantas (University of Geneva)

Platinum Sponsors (USD $10,000 +): 

 
Gold Sponsor (USD $5,000+):

Bronze Sponsors (USD $1,000+):  

Why Sponsor UMAP'2016? 

UMAP is the premier international conference for researchers and practitioners working on personalization and systems that adapt to individual users, to groups of users, and that collect, represent, and model user information. It is a successor of two successful conference series: User Modeling, which started in 1986, and Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia, which started in 2000. This year for the first time it has been sponsored by ACM under two SIGs: CHI and Web. The proceedings (previously published by Springer), from this year onwards will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

UMAP 2016 covers a wide variety of research areas where personalization and adaptation may be applied. This include (but is in no way limited to) a number of domains in which researchers are engendering significant innovations based on advances in user modeling and adaptation: recommender systems; adaptive educational systems; intelligent user interfaces; eCommerce; advertising; digital humanities; social networks; personalized health; entertainment, and many more. This year, there were 5 main themes/tracks, chaired by world-renoun researchers: 

• User Modelling for Recommender Systems
• Adaptive & Personalized Educational Systems
• Personalization in the Social Web & Crowdsourcing Era
• Adaptive, Intelligent, & Multimodal User Interfaces
• Architectures, techniques & methodologies for UMAP

UMAP 2016 provides doctoral students with the opportunity to explore and develop their research interests under the guidance of a panel of distinguished scholars, and possibilities for researchers to present and disucss their research, and to network with other researchers. A vibrant workshop program with 9 workshops and two tutorials, plus poster, demo and late-breaking results session complete the program of the conference. 

Your investment in the conference allows you to capitalize on UMAP's respected reputation and industry connections to increase your brand awareness, strengthen your exposure in the market place, and reinforce your position as an industry leader in personalization and user-adaptive systems. There are three other benefits: first, your kind sponsorship will help keep the costs of the conference reasonable for students, and improve the quality of the conference experience for all attendees world-wide. Second, sponsors will get an opportunity to showcase their state-of- the-art personalization and recommender technologies, which helps publicize your organization’s work and recruitment effort in the area of personalization and recommender systems. Third, sponsors will be able to get involved and influence the conference events and the community as a whole.

We offer three levels of sponsorship summarized in the table below. In recognition of all sponsorship levels, UMAP 2016 will acknowledge your support in the following ways:

• Your company name and logo will appear as sponsors on all formal conference announcements and on the program material given to attendees with indication of the level of sponsorship (Platinum, Gold, Silver)
• Your company name, logo and URL will be included in the conference website (with indication of the sponsorship level).
• You have the option of naming events. We will name an event after your company (e.g., conference banquet and poster reception). The choice of naming of events will be decided based on the level of sponsorship, the amount of the contribution and the order received.
• We will announce your company's contribution and offer thanks at the opening and closing sessions of the conference.
• You will have the opportunity to include material and give-aways with the conference material for each attendee.
• You can nominate people in your organization to organize a session or participate in industry events (e.g., industry panel).
• To help connect industry with the UMAP community, we are also planning to host exhibition booths possibly a job fair;  sponsors will have a priority since our space is limited.
• Depending on the level of sponsorship, you will get a number of free registrations for the conference, so that your employees can participate in the conference and represent your company.

If you are interested to become a sponsor, please, contact General Co-Chair Julita Vassileva (email). If you have any suggestions about your participation in UMAP 2016, we would also love to hear!

Sponsorship levels - summary:

T1: Semantics-Aware Techniques for Social Media Analysis, User Modeling, and Recommender Systems

Pasquale Lops and Cataldo Musto (University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy) 

Since the creation of the World Wide Web and with the advent of the Social Web - where almost any user can create and share content of different types – there was an exponential growth of the online information which gave new life to the research in the area of user modelling and recommender systems. Many information about user preferences can be also obtained by mining data gathered from many heterogeneous sources, such as the content posted by people on social networks and microblogs, in order to unveil latent information about their interests, automatically extract people personality traits, build preference models on the ground of textual reviews, and so on. At the same time, the recent phenomenon of (Linked) Open Data fueled this research line by making available a huge amount of machine-readable textual data.
However, a complete exploitation of such textual data requires a comprehension of the information conveyed by people and in turn, this requires a deep understanding of the language, which is not Hence, novel research works have introduced semantic techniques able to deal with the classical problems of simple keyword-based approaches by means of concept-based representations of items. The goal of this tutorial is to provide a broad overview of semantic techniques for enhanced content representations, some of which having their roots in NLP foundations, to build a new generation of semantics-aware services for user modeling, personalization and recommendation.

Intended audience: This tutorial will benefit researchers and practitioners with broad interest in user modeling and recommender systems, who are willing to have a whole picture of advanced semantics-aware techniques for building advanced and intelligent services for user modeling and recommender systems. The technical level of the tutorial will be intermediate.

Pasquale Lops is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. He received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bari in 2005 with a dissertation on “Hybrid Recommendation Techniques based on User Profiles”. His research interests include recommender systems, machine learning and user modelling. He authored over 120 articles published in international journals, international collections, proceedings of national and international conferences and workshops, and book chapters. He participated in more than 20 funded research projects. He is Area Chair of User Modelling for Recommender Systems at the International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization 2016, and Senior Program Committee member of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems since 2014. He co-organized several workshops related to user modeling and recommender systems.

Personal web site: http://www.di.uniba.it/~swap/lops.html   Google Scholar profile: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1MHRACkAAAAJ

Cataldo Musto is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. He completed his Ph.D. in 2012 with a dissertation on “Enhanced Vector Space Models for Content-based Recommender Systems”. His research focuses on the adoption of machine learning and natural language processing techniques for semantic content representation in recommender system, user modeling, and intelligent adaptive platforms. He was an invited speaker at the workshop on Semantic Adaptive and Social Web (SASWeb) at UMAP 2012 and at the first workshop on Financial Recommender Systems (FINREC 2015). He has published over 50 papers and served as reviewer or co-reviewer in the Program Committee of several conferences in the area as ACM Recommender Systems, ECIR, UMAP and WWW.

Personal web site: http://www.di.uniba.it/~swap/musto   Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pauGgdYAAAAJ&hl=it

T2: Games, gamification and personalization

Amon Rapp (University of Torino, Italy)

Games largely impact on players’ experience through their designs, by retaining them in the game world, modifying their habits and involving so that they can become addicted to them. For these reasons games have been largely used for behavior change interventions in the health, sustainability and wellness domains. One of the key for producing an engaging player experience in games is personalization: games are personalized on the basis of the players’ personalities, play styles, skills, and so on. This fundamental factor in games, however, is still not widely exploited in one of the most recent and popular techniques that uses game elements for behavior change purposes. Gamification, a design method that employs game elements in non-game contexts, aims at reproducing the effects of games even in non-game applications and services. Aim of this tutorial is providing an overview on how games implement personalized features and how they impact on players’ experience. Then, we will outline how games can be used for behavior change purposes. Among these opportunities we will focus on gamification, as a novel design technique able to affect users’ motivation and behavior. We will illustrate how gamification works, grounding it in behavior change theories. Finally, we will explore how gamification can implement personalization in its designs.

Learning objectives.

- to learn about personalization in games

- to be aware of the most important work in the state of the art and the evolution in the field of games used for behavior change

- to learn about gamification and its potentialities for design

- to experiment with some design techniques for producing personalized gamified services

Amon Rapp is a research fellow at the Computer Science Department at University of Torino, where he is a member of the Smart Interactive Objects and Systems group. He is currently the head of the Smart Personal Technology Lab at ICxT (Center for Innovation for Society and Territory). His main research interests are related to behavior change technologies, gamification and game design, and personal informatics. His research activity resulted in the organization of different workshops: “LinkQS” at Hypertext 2014 and “"New Frontiers of Quantified Self" at UBICOMP 2015. He teaches as an adjunct professor the Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction course at the Psychology Master Degree in the University of Torino. He served as a program committee member for several conferences and workshops in the field and was Session Chair at IEEE CIVEMSA Conference 2014 (Brain-Computer Interfaces Session), COIOTE Cognitive Internet of Things Technologies Conference (Affordances in Internet of Things Session) 2016, and HCI International 2016 (Quantified Self & Personal Informatics parallel session).

(Deadline: May 7, 2016)

Demonstrations

Demonstrations will showcase research prototypes and commercially available products of UMAP-based systems at the conference. Demonstrations are an excellent way to receive feedback from the conference audience. Descriptions of demonstrations should have a length of max 2 pages in the ACM SIG proceedings template. On an extra page (not to be published), submissions should include a specification of the technical requirements for demonstrating the system at UMAP 2016.

Posters

Descriptions of posters must be original and unpublished accounts of innovative work in progress or research that is best communicated in an interactive or graphical format. They should report at least preliminary results. Poster abstracts should have a length of max 2 pages in the ACM SIG proceedings template.

Late-Breaking Results

Late-breaking results must contain original and unpublished accounts of innovative research ideas, preliminary results, industry showcases, and system prototypes, addressing both the theory and practice of user modeling, adaptation and personalization. In addition, papers introducing recently started research projects or summarizing project results are welcome as well. Late-breaking results papers are expected to be longer than posters and demonstrations papers and should have a length of 4 to 6 pages in the ACM SIG proceedings template.

Submission and Review Process

Submissions (demos, posters and late-breaking results) must adhere to the ACM SIG proceedings format. A template can be found at:
http://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template

Submit your papers in PDF format via EasyChair for UMAP 2016 Demos, Posters, and Late-Breaking Results at:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=umap16postersdemos

The review process will be single blinded, i.e. authors’ names should be included in the papers. Submissions will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. They will be assessed based on their originality and novelty, potential contribution to the research field, potential impact in particular use cases, and the usefulness of presented experiences, as well as their overall readability. Papers that exceed the page limit for the corresponding category (2 pages for demos and posters and 6 pages for late-breaking results) or do not adhere to the formatting guidelines will be returned without review.

Publication and Presentation

Accepted demo, poster and late-breaking results papers will be published in the UMAP 2016 Extended Proceedings as a volume of CEUR Workshop Proceedings. All three categories will be presented at the poster reception of the conference, in the form of a poster and/or a software demonstration following poster format. This form of presentation will provide presenters with an opportunity to obtain direct one-to-one feedback about their work from a wide audience during the conference. Valid poster formats are a single slide of about 24″x36″ (ISO A1) or alternatively up to 9 ISO A4 slides.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the paper there.

Important Dates

Paper submission: May 7, 2016
Notification to Authors: June 1, 2016
Camera ready submission: June 7, 2016

The submissions times are 11:59 pm Hawaii time.

User Modelling for Recommender Systems

Area Chairs: Alexander Felfernig & Pasquale Lops

Semantic recommenders
Social recommenders
User Experience, Explanations, Trust, Control
Context-aware recommender systems
Conversational recommender systems
Implicit and explicit user feedback
Preference elicitation
Machine learning for recommender systems
Case studies of real-world implementations

Adaptive & Personalized Educational Systems

Area Chairs: Antonija Mitrovic & Kalina Yacef

Learner modeling
Intelligent tutoring systems
Adaptive and personalized learning support
Collaborative and group learning
Emerging environments such as MOOCs and educational games
Educational data mining and learning analytic modeling techniques
Learning at scale
Modeling affective, motivational, and metacognitive aspects of learning
Case studies of real-world implementations

Personalization in the Social Web & Crowdsourcing Era

Area Chairs: Alessandro Bozzon & Harith Alani

Data-driven approaches and big data techniques
Deep learning for personalization with social and crowd-generated data
Social network analysis
Modeling individuals, groups, and communities
Engagement & sustainability for personalization
User awareness and control
Privacy, perceived security, and trust
Adaptations based on personality, society, and culture
Mining of social media and crowd-generated data
Human computation and machine intelligence for personalization
Harnessing wisdom of the crowd for personalization
Case studies of real-world implementations

Adaptive, Intelligent, & Multimodal User Interfaces

Area Chairs: Julien Epps & Hatice Gunes

Multimodal user models
Natural interaction (speech, language, gestures)
Brain-computer interfaces
Adaptive information visualization
Adaptive hypermedia systems
Adaptive collaboration support
User modeling for special needs
Case studies of real-world implementations

Architectures, techniques & methodologies for UMAP

Area Chairs: Stephan Weibelzahl & Mihaela Cocea

Models of perception, action, cognition, and affect
Neurobiological and physiological models
User experience
Ongoing continuous modeling
Life wide modeling
Data-driven approaches
Non-standard database representations (networks, graphs)
Sensor networks
Handheld and mobile devices
Standards and specifications
Interoperability, semantics
Evaluation methodologies and metrics
Case studies of real-world implementations