Call for Industry Track Papers

 

The 34th annual ACM UMAP conference, the premier international forum for researchers in user experience, user modeling, personalized systems, and human-computer interaction, will be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, from June 8 to 11, 2026.

 

UMAP invites submissions for its Industry Track, a platform designed to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange by showcasing innovative, deployed solutions in user modeling, adaptation, and personalization. This track is distinct from others as it focuses on real-world challenges and practical solutions faced by industry practitioners, including novel deployed systems and substantial commercial case studies. Given the evolving regulatory landscape, including the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) and the EU AI Act, submissions that address compliance, ethical considerations, and societal impact are especially welcomed and encouraged, as these regulations significantly influence system design and operation. Please note that industry contributions are selected through a single-blind review process and are independent of conference sponsorship.

Important Dates

 March 6, 2026

Paper submission

April 3, 2026

Notification of acceptance

April 30, 2026

Camera-ready submission

May 1, 2026

Registration deadline for authors

June 8-11, 2026

Conference

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

Topics of Interest

We welcome submissions on a wide range of areas about practical applications, case studies, best practices, and innovative solutions within the core domains of User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP). Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Real-world implementation of UMAP systems, detailing case studies and lessons learned from deployment in sectors like e-commerce, media, or finance.
  • Design and operational challenges of real-time adaptive systems in practice, covering development frameworks and technologies.
  • Data-driven personalization strategies, focusing on practical approaches for leveraging large-scale and real-time data to achieve business impact.
  • Industry best practices and success metrics for evaluating dimensions like user satisfaction and long-term effects of UMAP solutions.
  • Innovative tools and platforms for user adaptation, covering architectures, frameworks, and engineering solutions.
  • Practical compliance engineering for personalized systems, specifically addressing regulatory requirements, such as the provisions of the EU DSA and the EU AI Act.
  • Privacy and ethical risks in user modeling, including industry solutions for data minimization, consent management, and ethical data handling.
  • Technical and organizational strategies for mitigating societal risks, such as preventing eco-chambers, user manipulation, and disinformation through personalization.
  • Development of compliant recommender systems, focusing on technical solutions for choice, fairness, and enabling user control.
  • Actionable data mining and machine learning techniques for extracting practical insights and building robust models for industrial user adaptation.
  • Development and deployment of generative AI (GenAI) techniques, including LLMs, to enhance user modeling and scalable content adaptation in production environments.
  • Development and scaling UMAP applications with Knowledge Graphs, Linked Data, and semantics, using engineering solutions to enrich user profiles and personalization features.
  • Intelligent user interfaces that dynamically adapt content and interactions based on dynamic user models.
  • UMAP solutions for specialized industry domains, such as personalized e-learning, serious games, and applications for behavior change or health.
  • Advanced interaction and personalization methods for virtual assistants, conversational agents, and experiences in augmented and mixed reality.
  • Practical methods for group modeling and collaborative personalization, focusing on optimizing team formation and organizational dynamics.
  • Implementation of Human-Centered AI (HCAI) principles, covering industry workflows and technical solutions for fairness, accountability, and transparency.
  • Creativity in UMAP, including methods and case studies on using personalization to drive user discovery and creative expression.
  • UMAP applications for social good and sustainability, focusing on promoting UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) or driving sustainability-aware user behaviors.
  • Reproducibility and auditability in industrial UMAP deployments, covering practical processes and tools for ensuring system robustness and compliance.

All industry papers will be presented as posters and published in the conference proceedings, while a select number will be invited to give oral presentations.

Submission Guidelines

Papers should be submitted electronically, in PDF format, through the EasyChair submission system (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=umap2026), by selecting the “Industry” track.

 

Submission length. Industry papers must be no longer than 3 pages, excluding author bios and references. Author bios are not mandatory.

 

Auxiliary material. Authors can also submit auxiliary material to enhance reproducibility (e.g., experiment details, proof details), but papers should be self-contained, and reviewers are not required to review the auxiliary material. We recommend that supplementary material is linked to an external source using an anonymized link.

 

Language. All submissions must be written in English.

 

Format and template. Following the ACM publication workflow, all contributions should be submitted for review in the ACM double-column format. Instructions for authors are given below.

 

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.

 

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.

Authorship policy

Authors are strongly encouraged to carefully review ACM’s authorship policy before submitting their papers. All authors must be listed in the correct order in EasyChair by the submission deadline. Moreover, they should adhere to the ACM Conflict of Interest policy. CoI refers to close personal relationships, continuing collaborations in the past 3 years (e.g., co-author on paper, joint grant), past or current advisor/advisee relationship, and employment at the same institution in the past 3 years. For full details, please visit this site: https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/conflict-of-interest.

 

All co-authors of submitted contributions are expected to have made a clear and independent contribution to the work under consideration, and author lists at submission time are expected to be final.

 

Please ensure that all authors obtain an ORCID, to complete the publishing process for accepted contributions, since, as an ACM conference, we have committed to collecting ORCIDs from all of our published authors. This helps improve author discoverability, ensure proper attribution, and contribute to ongoing community efforts around name normalization.

Review process

Submissions are single-blind, meaning that authors do not have to make their authorship and affiliation anonymous, as well as any reference to their work, products, code, etc. Each submission will undergo a peer-review process to ensure the quality and relevance of the content. The review process will be conducted by a specific industry program committee. Please note that the page limit and format requirements are strict. Non-compliant submissions will be desk-rejected.

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 paper submission

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.

Registration and presentation policy

At least one author of accepted papers must register for the conference by the early registration date cut-off, and present 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 UMAP 2026. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Presentation format

All accepted industry papers will be presented as posters, while a selected number of contributions will be invited to give oral presentations during the Industry Track session at the UMAP 2026 conference. Presenters will have the opportunity to engage with an audience of industry professionals and academic researchers.

Industry chairs

  • Kim Falk (DPG Media)
  • Erasmo Purificato (European Centre for Algorithmic Transparency, Joint Research Centre, European Commission)
  • Chen Zheng (Roblox)

Contact Information

For any questions or further information, please contact the Industry Track Chairs at umap2026-industry@um.org.

 

We look forward to your contributions and to an exciting exchange of ideas at the UMAP 2026 Conference!

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