Last CfP: UMAP Workshop on Comparative Evaluation in User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (EvalUMAP 2016)

**** Apologies for cross postings ****

EvalUMAP 2016 Workshop

Towards comparative evaluation in user modeling, adaptation and 
personalization held in conjunction with UMAP 2016, July 13-17, Halifax, 
NS, Canada.

http://evalumap.adaptcentre.ie/

**Extended submission deadline: May 16, 2016* *


======================== CALL FOR PAPERS =======================

EvalUMAP 2016 Workshop

Towards comparative evaluation in user modeling, adaptation and 
personalization

http://evalumap.adaptcentre.ie/

================================================================

To be held in conjunction with the 24th Conference on User Modeling, 
Adaptation and Personalization, UMAP 2016, July 2016, Halifax, Canada

Call for Papers
Extended Submission deadline: May 16, 2016

Research in the areas of User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization 
faces a number of significant scientific challenges. One of the most 
significant of these challenges is the issue of comparative evaluation. 
It has always been difficult to rigorously compare different approaches 
to personalization, as the function of the resulting systems is, by 
their nature, heavily influenced by the behaviour of the users involved 
in trialling the systems. To-date this topic has received relatively 
little attention. Developing comparative evaluations in this space would 
be a huge advancement as it would enable shared comparison across 
research, which to-date has been very limited.
Taking inspiration from communities such as Information Retrieval and 
Machine Translation, the first EvalUMAP Workshop seeks to propose and 
design one or more shared tasks to support the comparative evaluation of 
approaches to User Modelling, Adaptation and Personalization. The 
workshop will solicit presentations from key practitioners in the field 
on innovative approaches to evaluating such systems and will provide a 
forum to start scoping and designing tasks for the following year. The 
resulting shared task(s) will be accompanied by appropriate models, 
content, metadata, user behaviours, etc., and can be used to 
comprehensively compare how different approaches and systems perform. In 
addition, a number of metrics and observations will be outlined, that 
participants would be expected to perform in order to facilitate comparison.

The planned outcome of the EvalUMAP Workshop 2016 will be a roadmap to 
develop initial shared task(s) that will be published well in advance of 
UMAP 2017, giving an opportunity for participants to test and tune their 
systems and complete the task in order for comparative results and 
associated publications to be prepared for and presented at the EvalUMAP 
Workshop in 2017. We envision that EvalUMAP 2017 will be the starting 
point for an annual comparative evaluation challenge at future UMAP 
conferences.

*Workshop topics are evaluation focused and include, but are not limited 
to:*

- Understanding UMAP evaluation
- Defining tasks and scenarios for evaluation purposes
- Identification of potential corpora for shared tasks
- Interesting target tasks and explanations of their importance
- Critiques or comparisons of existing evaluation metrics and methods
- How we can combine existing evaluation metrics and methods
- Improving on previously suggested metrics and methods
- Reducing the cost of evaluation
- Proposal of new evaluation metrics and methods
- Technical challenges associated with design and implementation
- Privacy, Ethics and security issues
- Legal and ethical issues
- Workshop format:

This will be an interactive workshop structured to encourage group 
discussion and active collaboration among attendees. The workshop will 
feature a keynote talk, lightning round presentation session for 
position papers, multiple (parallel) breakout sessions, and a final 
discussion session to wrap up the event.

*Paper Submissions*

The workshop is now accepting paper submissions. Position papers (max 2 
pages) describing approaches or ideas / challenges on the topics of the 
workshop are invited. Submissions should be in ACM SIGS format. LaTeX 
and Word templates are available at 
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates.

Papers should be submitted in pdf format through the EasyChair system 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=evalumap2016 no later than 
midnight Pacific Daylight Time on May 7, 2016. Submissions will be 
reviewed by members of the workshop program committee. Accepted papers 
will be included in the UMAP 2016 EvalUMAP workshop proceedings, which 
will be indexed with CEUR. Authors of select papers may be invited to 
contribute to a journal publication which describes the outcomes of the 
workshop.

*Further Information*

Further information is available on the workshop website at 
http://evalumap.adaptcentre.ie/ or by emailing the workshop organizers 
at evalumap@adaptcentre.ie.

*Workshop Organizers*

Owen Conlan, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Liadh Kelly, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Kevin Koidl, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Séamus Lawless, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Killian Levacher, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Athanasios Staikopoulos, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland