ACM UMAP is the premier international conference for researchers and practitioners working on systems that adapt to individual users or groups of users, and that collect, represent, and model user information. ACM UMAP is sponsored by ACM SIGCHI and SIGWEB. User Modeling Inc., as the core Steering Committee, oversees the conference organization. Further, UMAP operates under the ACM Conference Code of Conduct.

The theme of UMAP 2023 is “Personalization in Times of Crisis”. Specifically, we welcome submissions that highlight the impact that critical periods (such as the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing wars, and climate change, to name a few) can have on user modeling, personalization, and adaptation of (intelligent) systems; the focus is on investigations that capture how these trying times may have influenced user behavior and whether new models are required. 

We encourage submissions related to this year’s theme. Nevertheless, the scope of the conference is not limited to the theme only. As always, contributions from academia, industry, and other organizations discussing open challenges or novel research approaches related to user modeling, personalization, and adaptation are expected to be supported by rigorous evidence appropriate to the claims (e.g., user study, system evaluation, computational analysis).

Important Dates

• Paper Abstracts:   January 19, 2023 (mandatory)
• Full paper:             January 26, 2023
• Notification:           April 11, 2023
• Camera-ready:      May 2, 2023
• Conference:          June 26 – 29, 2023

Note: The submissions deadlines are at 11:59 pm AoE time (Anywhere on Earth)

Tracks

Below you will find a detailed description of the focus of each conference track, as well as possible topics of interest associated with each track.

Personalized Recommender Systems

Track chairs:

Noemi Mauro (University of Torino, Italy), Olfa Nasraoui (University of Louisville, USA), and Marko Tkalcic (University of Primorska, Slovenia)

Personalized, computer-generated recommendations have become a pervasive feature of today’s online world. From the traditional book and movie recommendations, to suggestions of what we should eat and wear or where we should travel, recommender systems are seamlessly embedded in our daily lives. The underlying recommender systems are designed to help users and providers in a number of ways. From a user’s viewpoint, these systems assist humans by identifying relevant items or options (e.g., products, services, news articles, connections) within large collections. From a provider’s perspective, recommender systems have shown to be powerful tools to help users sift through massive information and steer consumer behavior. Regardless of who are the main stakeholders, the design of recommender systems requires the careful consideration of various aspects, including the choice of the user modeling approach, the recommendation algorithm itself, and the user interface.Read More

Knowledge Graphs, Semantics, Social and Adaptive Web 

Track chairs:

Daniela Godoy (ISISTAN – CONICET/UNICEN University, Argentina) and Cataldo Musto (University of Bari, Italy)

The use of graphs recently emerged as a natural and straightforward fashion to effectively model a broad range of phenomena and scenarios, ranging from the relationships in a social network to the elements encoded in a knowledge base, without forgetting their applications related to bio-informatics, web page searching, transportation and navigation. 

Research in the area of graphs typically includes approaches for: (i) representing and modeling graphs in an effective way; (ii) reasoning over a graph to learn new information; (iii) exploiting the information encoded in the graph for a specific application. All these methods have triggered several heterogeneous research lines, that in turn significantly impacted user modeling, adaptation and personalization.

As an example, the recent rise of knowledge graphs such as DBpedia and Wikidata has fueled the research in the area of adaptive web and personalized applications (e.g., recommender systems) by providing new and meaningful data points to model and represent all the actors (items, users, etc.) involved in the personalization process. Read More

Intelligent User Interfaces

Track chairs:

Bart Knijnenburg (Clemson University, USA), Katrien Verbert (KU Leuven, Belgium), and Wolfgang Wörndl (TU Munich, Germany)

User modeling allows systems to provide personalized support to humans, unlocking a potential to accomplish a wider range of tasks and/or make their existing tasks more efficient and/or convenient. While such systems are envisioned to seamlessly complement human abilities, research shows that humans do not always make the best possible decisions when working together with computer systems. Intelligent user interfaces aim to make the interaction between computer systems and humans smarter, more user-friendly, and more productive.

Papers in this track explore the design, implementation, and evaluation of personalized/intelligent user-facing systems, interfaces, and interaction mechanisms. By designing and deploying improved forms of support for interactive collaboration between human decision makers and personalized systems, intelligent user interfaces enable decision making processes that better leverage the strengths of both collaborators. Beyond user modeling and personalization, papers in this track are encouraged to leverage solutions from human-computer interaction, data mining, natural language processing, information visualization, and/or knowledge representation and reasoning. Read More

Personalizing Learning Experiences through User Modeling.

Track chairs:

Oleksandra Poquet (TU Munich, Germany) and Olga C. Santos (UNED, Spain)

Technology has become an integral aspect of the everyday practices of learning. Navigating the streams of information, acquiring new skills and competences, and developing knowledge ‘on the go’ in formal education, personal study, workplaces, personal development, and health, are increasingly valued and necessary. In fact, technological innovations bring new opportunities to support learners’ needs, to orchestrate personalized learning solutions, and to enable feedback processes and learner-algorithm interaction with and without the involvement of the teacher. This opens up opportunities for innovation by modeling the cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, affective, social, and psychomotor aspects of learning that can improve the effectiveness of personalized learning experiences for learning progress and learner/teacher satisfaction. Furthermore, the topic of developing learner agency when using adaptive feedback in intelligent learning systems has always been at the forefront of the UMAP research so that the learner can keep the control of the personalization. Today’s personalized learning solutions require advancement of this area as prescriptive algorithm-based elements are introduced into feedback systems. Read More

Responsibility, Compliance, and Ethics

Track chairs:

Michael Ekstrand (Boise State University, USA) and Peter Knees (TU Wien, Austria)

Researchers and developers have a social responsibility to care about the impact of their technologies on individual people (users, providers, and other stakeholders) and on society. This involves building, maintaining, evaluating, and studying adaptive systems that are fair, ethical, beneficial to society, and in line with universal human rights. The importance of these topics is highlighted by their presence in ethical guidelines such as the ACM Code of Ethics, policy guidelines such as UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, as well as their influence on law and regulation such as the EU’s GDPR and the proposed AI Act.

Following these developments, the track on “Responsibility, Compliance, and Ethics” seeks contributions dealing with ethical and social matters of adaptive systems, such as fairness and privacy, as well as works addressing compliance with policies and regulations, such as requirements for transparency, accountability, and protection of sensitive data. Read More

Personalization for Persuasive and Behavior Change Systems

Track chairs:

Federica Cena (University of Torino, Italy), Rita Orji (Dalhousie University, Canada), and Jun Zhao (Oxford University, England)

For solving many different societal problems, changing human behavior is crucial. Persuasive and Behaviour change systems are intentionally designed to support people to achieve behavior change objectives. Research in this area has advanced over the years attracting interest from both practitioners and researchers due to the increasing realization of the important role interactive technologies can play in assisting and motivating people to achieve their various goals and objectives. 

Persuasive and behavior change systems have applications in various domains including health and wellness, safety and security, environmental sustainability, education, and politics. Personalization of persuasive and behavior change systems adapts and tailors these systems to increase their relevance, motivational appeal, user experience, and hence their overall effectiveness at empowering and assisting people to achieve their goals, which are core final aims of user modeling, and adaptation and personalization of systems. However, the persuasive use of personalizations on today’s large platforms or digital technologies is causing increasing concerns about behavior engineering that may harm users’ digital wellbeing or autonomy. Despite the recent advances, research in this area is generally still in its infancy and there are many crucial research challenges ready for innovation. Read More

Virtual Assistants, Conversational Interactions, and Personalized Human-robot Interaction

Track chairs:

Li Chen (Hong Kong Baptist University, Hongkong), Yi Zhang (University of California Santa Cruz, USA), and Ingrid Zukerman (Monash University, Australia)

Virtual assistants and conversational agents are being employed to support information search and exploration, as well as to mediate interaction with users. Human-robot interaction is also increasingly attracting attention as a new model to support user activity and empowerment, with particular attention to people with physical impairments, who can benefit from assistance during the execution of tasks. People may also be able to benefit from companionship provided by virtual assistants and robots. In both contexts, personalization is a key element to support the adaptation of an agent to personal interests, idiosyncrasies, and needs.Read More

Research Methods and Reproducibility

Track chairs:

Dietmar Jannach (University of Klagenfurt, Austria) and Alan Said (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)

Research on user modeling and adaptive systems has greatly evolved during the last decades, but important challenges remain regarding the systematic comparison of different systems, the development of universally accepted and applied methodologies, and the use of standardized metrics to evaluate the acceptability and usefulness of systems to the user.

This track invites submissions on methodologies to evaluate personalized systems, benchmarks, and measurement scales, with particular attention to the reproducibility of results and techniques. Furthermore, the track looks for submissions reporting new insights from reproducing existing works.

Read More

Submission

Papers will be submitted through EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=umap23.

All submissions and reviews will be handled electronically. UMAP has a no dual submission policy, which is why submitted manuscripts should not be currently under review at another publication venue.

ACM’s publication policies:

1. “By submitting your article to an ACM Publication, you are hereby acknowledging that you and your co-authors are subject to allACM Publications Policies, includingACM’s new Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects. Alleged violations of this policy or any ACM Publications Policy will be investigated by ACM and may result in a full retraction of your paper, in addition to other potential penalties, as per ACM Publications Policy.” https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/research-involving-human-participants-and-subjects
2. “Please ensure that you and your co-authorsobtain an ORCID ID, so you can complete the publishing process for your accepted paper. ACM has been involved in ORCID from the start and we have recently made acommitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. The collection process has started and will roll out as a requirement throughout 2022. We are committed to improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization; your ORCID ID will help in these efforts.” 

Content Expectations

Papers should report on original and substantial contributions of lasting value. Described work should concern the theory and/or practice of UMAP. Moreover, papers showcasing the innovative use of UMAP and exploring the benefits and challenges of applying UMAP technology in real-life applications and contexts are welcome.

Evaluations of proposed solutions/applications must be commensurate with the claims made in the paper. Depending on the intended contribution, this may include simulation studies, offline evaluations, A/B tests, or controlled user experiments.

Research procedures and technical methods should be presented in sufficient detail to ensure scrutiny and reproducibility. We recognize that user data may be proprietary or confidential, but we encourage the sharing of (anonymized, cleaned) data sets, data collection procedures, and code.
Results should be clearly communicated and implications of the contributions/findings for UMAP and beyond should be explicitly discussed.

Ethical & Human Subjects Considerations

UMAP expects papers to include a discussion of the ethical considerations, as well as the impact of the presented work and/or its intended application, where appropriate. UMAP further expects all authors to comply with ethical standards and regulatory guidelines associated with human subjects research, including research involving human participants and research using personally identifiable data. Papers reporting on such human subjects research must include a statement identifying any regulatory review the research is subject to (and identifying the form of approval provided), or explaining the lack of required review.
Length and Formatting

Length & Formatting

We encourage papers of any length up to 14 pages (excluding references) using the new ACM single-column format template. The templates and instructions are available here: https://www.acm.org/publications/taps/word-template-workflow.

Shorter papers should generally report on advances that can be described, set into context, and evaluated concisely; they are not “work-in-progress” reports but rather complete reports on a smaller or simpler-to-describe but complete research work. Longer papers should reflect more complex innovations or studies and should have a more thorough discussion of related work. Appendices count toward the page limit—we recommend that supplementary material is linked to an external source using an anonymized URL.

Submissions must be anonymous, given that UMAP uses a double-blind review process. Authors must omit their names and affiliations from submissions, and avoid obvious identifying statements. For instance, citations to the authors’ own prior work should be made in the third person. Failure to anonymize your submission could result in desk rejection.

Available templates:

• LaTeX (use \documentclass[manuscript, review, anonymous]{acmart} in the sample-authordraft.tex file for single-column): Preparing Your Article with LaTeX (acm.org)
• Overleaf (use \documentclass[manuscript,review,anonymous]{acmart} for single-column):Overleaf (acm.org)
• Word Preparing Your Article with Microsoft Word (acm.org)

Authors are strongly encouraged to provide “alt text” (alternative text) for floats (images, tables, etc.) in their content so that readers with disabilities can be given descriptive information for these floats that are important to the work. The descriptive text will be displayed in place of a float if the float cannot be loaded. This benefits the author and it broadens the reader base for the author’s work. Moreover, the alt text provides in-depth float descriptions to search engine crawlers, which helps to properly index these floats. Additionally, authors should follow the ACM Accessibility Recommendations for Publishing in Color and SIG ACCESS guidelines on describing figures.

Accepted papers will be subject to further revision to meet the requirements of the camera-ready format required by ACM. We strongly recommend the usage of LaTeX/Overleaf for the camera-ready papers to minimize the extent of reformatting. Users of the Word template must use either the version for Microsoft Word for Windows, Macintosh Office 2011, or Macintosh Office 2016 (other formats such as Open Office, etc., are not admitted) for the camera-ready submission to avoid incompatibility issues.

Instructions for preparing the camera-ready versions of accepted papers will be provided after acceptance. This might include instructions to prepare a video of the accepted contribution. Camera-ready versions of accepted papers will be later submitted using ACM’s new production platform where authors will be able to review PDF and HTML output formats before publication.

Review Process

UMAP uses a double-blind review process.

Reviewers will evaluate papers based on their significance, originality, rigor, and contribution to the field. Papers that are out of scope, incomplete, or lack sufficient evidence to support the basic claims, may be rejected without full review. Furthermore, reviewers will be asked to comment on whether the length is appropriate for the contribution. 

The ACM Code of Ethics gives the UMAP program committee the right to (desk-)reject papers that perpetuate harmful stereotypes, employ unethical research practices, or uncritically present outcomes/implications that disadvantage minoritized communities. Further, reviewers will be explicitly asked to consider whether the research was conducted in compliance with professional ethical standards and applicable regulatory guidelines. Failure to do so could lead to a (desk-)rejection

Attendance & Proceedings

Each accepted paper will be included in the conference proceedings and presented (in person) at the conference. 

At least one author should register for the conference by the early registration date cut-off.

The official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks before the first day of your conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Program Chairs

• Julia Neidhardt, TU Wien, Austria 
• Sole Pera, TU Delft, The Netherlands

Contact information: umap2023-program@um.org