Call for Papers

ACM UMAP is the premier international conference bringing together research in AI and HCI to support effective human-AI collaboration via interactive systems that can model, adapt and personalize to their users. The conference is sponsored by ACM SIGCHI and SIGWEB. User Modeling Inc., as the core Steering Committee, oversees the conference organization. UMAP operates under the ACM Conference Code of Conduct.

ACM UMAP 2026 will bring together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from around the world to discuss the latest developments in human-centered approaches to design and use and evaluate AI systems that adapt to human needs while ensuring, at the same time, user control, fairness, accountability, transparency, inclusivity and sustainability. The accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings, accessible through the ACM Digital Library.

Important Dates

January 22, 2026

Abstract submission

January 29, 2026

Paper submission

March 2-9, 2026

Rebuttal phase

March 25, 2026

Notification of acceptance

April 10, 2026

Camera-ready papers due

June 8-11, 2026

Conference

Note: the submission deadline is at 11:59 pm AoE (Anywhere on Earth) time.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to

  • Creativity in User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization
  • Intelligent and personalized user interfaces
  • Data mining techniques for user modeling, adaptation, and personalization
  • Application of user modeling and personalization to well-being and health
  • Personalized behavior change and persuasive applications
  • Human-agent interaction
  • Long-term personalization and lifelong learning
  • Intelligent and personalized e-learning applications and educational games
  • Generative AI techniques for user modeling, adaptation, and personalization
  • Personalized user interaction with agents
  • Large Language Models and Natural Language Processing methods for user modeling, adaptation and personalization
  • Knowledge graphs, Linked data, and semantics for user modeling, adaptation, and personalization
  • Modeling and adapting to human affective states
  • Virtual assistants, conversational agents, and personalization in augmented reality
  • Group modeling and collaborative team formation
  • Ethical issues of personalization and human-centered AI systems: Privacy, Fairness, Accountability, Transparency
  • Sustainability-aware methods and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for user modeling, adaptation, and personalization
  • Personalized approaches for preventing eco-chambers, user manipulation, and disinformation
  • Evaluation methods for human-centered adaptive systems
  • Research methods and reproducibility (including benchmarks, datasets, and challenges)

Benefits of Attending

  • Present your research to a global audience of experts in your field
  • Connect with leading industry partners.
  • Network with colleagues and potential collaborators
  • Learn about the latest developments in the intersection of AI and Human-Computer Interaction

Submission Guidelines

 

All submissions must be written in English. Papers should be submitted electronically, in PDF format, through the EasyChair submission system, https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=umap2026, by selecting the “Full and Short Papers” track.

Format. We encourage two types of submissions (reviewers will comment on whether the size is appropriate for each contribution), in the ACM two-column format:

  • Long papers (8 pages at most plus additional pages for references; figures, tables, proofs, appendixes, acknowledgments, and any other content count toward the page limit) should report on substantial contributions of lasting value. They should reflect more complex innovations or studies and should have a more thorough discussion of related work. Each accepted long paper will be included in the main conference proceedings and presented in a plenary session as part of the main conference program.
  • Short papers (4 pages at most plus additional pages for references; figures, tables, proofs, appendixes, acknowledgments, and any other content count toward the page limit) typically discuss exciting new work that is not yet mature enough for a long paper – they are not “work-in-progress” reports but rather complete reports on a smaller or simpler-to-describe but complete research work on advances that can be described, set into context, and evaluated concisely. In particular, novel but significant proposals will be considered for acceptance to this category despite not having gone through sufficient experimental validation or lacking a strong theoretical foundation. Each accepted short paper will be included in the main conference proceedings and presented either as an oral presentation or at a poster session as part of the main conference program.

We recommend that supplementary material is linked to an external source using an anonymized link.

Anonymity. Submissions must be anonymous, given that ACM 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’ prior work should be made in the third person. Failure to anonymize your submission could result in desk rejection. It is acceptable to explicitly refer in the paper to the companies or organizations that provided datasets, hosted experiments or deployed solutions if there is no implication that the authors are currently affiliated with the mentioned organization. To release code and additional materials while preserving anonymity, we suggest using anonymous repositories such as https://anonymous.4open.science.

Templates. Following the ACM Publication Workflow, all authors should submit manuscripts for review in the ACM double-column format. Instructions for authors are given below:

  • LaTeX: Please use the latest version of the Primary Article Template – LaTeX to create your submission. Start the document with the \documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart} command to generate the output in a double-column format. Please see the LaTeX documentation and ACM’s LaTeX best practices guide for further instructions, ignoring the single-column instructions. Do not use the “manuscript” option, otherwise, the document will not be compiled in double-column, as required. Check the sample-sigconf.tex file included in the template package for a formatting example. To ensure 100% compatibility with The ACM Publishing System (TAPS), please restrict the use of packages to the whitelist of approved LaTeX packages.
  • Overleaf: (use \documentclass[sigconf,review,anonymous]{acmart} for double-column). Please carefully follow the ACM’s instructions for preparing your article with Overleaf.
  • Word: Please carefully follow the ACM’s instructions for preparing your article with Microsoft Word, ignoring the single-column instructions and the single-column submission template. Please use the double-column Word template.

Plagiarism and use of AI policy. Plagiarized papers will not be accepted. Our committees will be checking the plagiarism level of all submitted papers to ensure content originality using an automated tool. If you reuse non-novel text from a prior publication (e.g., the description of an algorithm or dataset), please be sure to cite the prior publication as the source of that text. If you have questions about the reuse of text or simultaneous submission, please contact the program chairs at least one week prior to the submission deadline. Please refer to the ACM Publishing License Agreement and Authorship Policy for further details.

 

Authors must follow the ACM Policy on the use of generative AI software tools. If a paper includes material generated by GenAI tools (such as text produced by large language models like ChatGPT), it is essential to disclose the extent and nature of this use in a section titled “Acknowledgments”. This allows reviewers to evaluate the overall rigor of the research methodology. However, the use of AI tools for editing and refining authors’ work—meaning tasks like grammar checks, word autocorrect, and other light editing—does not require disclosure. Authors who choose to utilize GenAI tools are fully responsible for any inaccuracies, biases, plagiarism, and other violations, just as if they had created the content themselves. Submissions that are primarily produced by GenAI without substantial contributions from the authors are prohibited and considered spam. Only humans are permitted to be authors of submitted papers.

 

Papers violating any of the above guidelines are subject to rejection without review and cases may be referred to the ACM Publications Ethics and Plagiarism committee for further action where warranted.

Accessibility. 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.

Submission Policy. All submissions and reviews will be handled electronically. ACM UMAP has a no dual submission policy, which is why submitted manuscripts should not be currently under review at another publication venue. Particularly, please consider the following 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 all ACM Publications Policies, including ACM’s 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.”
  2. “Please ensure that you and your co-authors obtain 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 a commitment to collect ORCID IDs from all of our published authors. 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.”

Review process

ACM UMAP uses a double-blind review process. Authors must omit their names and affiliations from their submissions; they should also avoid obvious identifying statements. Submissions not abiding by anonymity requirements will be desk rejected.

 

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. In addition, a rebuttal stage will be part of the evaluation, offering a small window for authors to optionally discuss the initial decision of their submission, enhancing the transparency and quality of the reviewing process.

 

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 clearly disadvantage minoritized communities. Reviewers will be asked to consider whether the research was conducted in compliance with professional ethical standards and applicable regulatory guidelines.

Registration and presentation policy

At least one author of accepted papers must register for the conference, completed by the early registration date cut-off. Each accepted paper must be presented in person to be included in the conference proceedings, published by ACM, and available via the ACM Digital Library. The official publication date is when the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks before the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Ethical & Human Subjects Considerations

ACM 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. ACM 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.

Camera-ready submission and Open Access

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.

Important update on ACMs new open access publishing model for 2026 ACM Conferences!

Starting January 1, 2026, ACM will fully transition to Open Access. All ACM publications, including those from ACM-sponsored conferences, will be 100% Open Access. Authors will have two primary options for publishing Open Access articles with ACM: the ACM Open institutional model or by paying Article Processing Charges (APCs). With over 2,600 institutions already part of ACM Open, the majority of ACM-sponsored conference papers will not require APCs from authors or conferences (currently, around 76%). 

 

Authors from institutions not participating in ACM Open will need to pay an APC to publish their papers, unless they qualify for a financial waiver. To find out whether an APC applies to your article, please consult the list of participating institutions in ACM Open and review the https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/policy-on-discretionary-open-access-apc-waivers.  Keep in mind that waivers are rare and are granted based on specific criteria set by ACM.

 

Understanding that this change could present financial challenges, ACM has approved a temporary subsidy for 2026 to ease the transition and allow more time for institutions to join ACM Open. The subsidy will offer:

  • $250 APC for ACM/SIG members
  • $350 for non-members

This represents a 65% discount, funded directly by ACM. Authors are encouraged to help advocate for their institutions to join ACM Open during this transition period.

 

This temporary subsidized pricing will apply to all conferences scheduled for 2026.

Contact

For any questions, please contact the UMAP ‘26 Program Chairs at umap2026-programchairs@um.org.

  • Alejandro Bellogín, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
  • Nadja (Berardina) De Carolis, University of Bari, Italy
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