AUM 2011
International Workshop on

Augmenting User Models with Real World Experiences
to Enhance Personalization and Adaptation

In conjunction with UMAP 2011
Girona, Spain
11 - 15 July 2011

http://wis.ewi.tudelft.nl/aum2011/


IMPORTANT DATES
====================================
* 15 April 2011: Submission deadline (23:59 pm Hawaiian time)
* 13 May 2011: Notification of acceptance
* 17 June 2011: Camera-ready paper
* 6 May 2011: Demo & position paper submission deadline
* 11 or 15 July: AUM workshop


OVERVIEW
========
|
The digital world, i.e. our interaction with computer systems,
becomes more and more connected with the physical world,
i.e. our real-world activities and experiences. This changes
the way we use technologies and opens up new opportunities
for personalization and adaptation. People blog, post, chat,
comment, tweet about things that matter to them: what they
had for dinner, what their job activities were, what they
thought about a particular television broadcast, et cetera.
People share content about their activities, e.g. pictures
taken at a concert, videos of business meetings, reports on
business trips, personal stories. This abundant digital
information stream has become an important backchannel in
our daily lives. We constantly create digital traces about
our experiences, which can be invaluable source for
personalization.

The time is ripe for developing new adaptation paradigms
that exploit digital traces to extend users' personalized
experience by connecting the digital, social and physical
worlds. Hence, traditional adaptation mechanisms (such as
feedback, help, guidance) can be extended to become more
effective by taking into account not only the user's
experience in the digital world (i.e. the conventional user
modeling paradigm), but also relevant experience (of this
user or of similar users) in the physical world. The latter
approach, which is the focus of this workshop, represents
an emerging research strand whereby user models are
augmented with real world knowledge to enhance adaptation
and personalization.

Digital traces can be attributed to more than one individual,
e.g. a circle of friends, a scientific community or even a
whole population can be characterized by topics they tweet
about, or things they comment about. Furthermore, events,
e.g. conferences, local or global disasters, political
debates, can be modeled by the streams of digital traces
generated around these events (e.g. pictures, comments,
discussions and reactions). Technological advancements, such
as data/text mining, information extraction, opinion mining,
social signal processing, interactive story telling,
intelligent media annotation, semantic alignment, media
aggregation and retrieval, make it now possible to automate
the processing of digital traces to enrich system's
understanding about users' experiences in the physical world.
This technological development brings new opportunities to the
user modeling community, and at the same time, opens up new
technological, social, and ethical challenges.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
==================
The AUM workshop aims to create a forum for academic and
industrial researchers and practitioners to discuss augmented
user modeling from three angles:

* Modeling: methods and techniques for analyzing digital traces
to capture, represent and connect user experiences:
- What sources of digital traces can be used and are there
any social and ethical constraints?
- What aspects of user experience are captured in different
digital traces and what techniques can be used to analyze
digital traces?
- How can digital traces be processed, connected, and
aggregated to provide useful information for modeling users
and real-world activities/events?
- To what extent do these models represent what people,
groups and events 'really' are in the physical world, e.g.
do they conform to models and theories from social science?

* Alignment: methods and techniques for augmenting user models
by aligning digital and real-world experiences:
- How can digital traces be connected and represented to
augment existing user models and to create holistic models
of users, events, objects and groups?
- How can parts of these holistic models be identified that
are relevant to a certain user context - physical or
digital?
- How can different perspectives on activities and events be
catered for and should they be aggregated in augmented user
models?

* Application: personalization and adaptation approaches and
application areas which can benefit from
augmented user models:
- How can adaptation and personalization approaches benefit
from augmented user models?
- What are the potential application domains (e.g. adaptive
simulators, personalized virtual museums, personalized media
retrieval, personalized information portals, personal
assistants) and how can augmented user modeling improve the
user experience in these domains?
- Which types of personalization, recommendation and
information filtering are possible and desirable for
different applications or different real-world events (e.g.
entertainment activities, job tasks, breaking news)?


PAPER SUBMISSION
================
All papers must represent original and unpublished work that
is not currently under review. Papers will be evaluated
according to their significance, originality, technical
content, style, clarity, and relevance to the workshop.
At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to
attend the workshop.

We welcome the following types of contributions.

* Short (up to 6 pages) and full (up to 12 pages) research
papers will be reviewed by at least two independent
referees.
* Demo papers (system demonstrations) and position statements
should not exceed 3 pages.

All submissions must be written in English and must be
formatted according to the information for LNCS authors:
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0

Please submit your contributions electronically in PDF
format via:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=aum2011

We aim to publish the proceedings as a CEUR Workshop
Proceedings volume.


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
===================
* Fabian Abel (Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands)
* Vania Dimitrova (School of Computing, University of Leeds, UK)
* Eelco Herder (L3S Research Center, Germany)
* Geert-Jan Houben (Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands)

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
===================
* Available at http://www.wis.ewi.tudelft.nl/aum2011/