CFP: WSDM 2011 Workshop - UMWA2011: User Modeling for Web Applications
http://research.yahoo.com/workshops/umwa2011/
Hong Kong, China, Feb 9, 2011
=============================================================
Organizers
David Carmel, IBM Research Haifa, Israel, carmel@il.ibm.com
Vanja Josifovski, Yahoo! Research, USA, vanjaj@yahoo-inc.com
Yoelle Maarek, Yahoo! Research, Israel, yoelle@ymail.com
=============================================================
Background:
Users have taken a more and more central role in the Web. Their role is both explicit, as they become more savvy, they have more expectations, and new interactive features keep appearing, and implicit, as their actions are monitored at various levels of granularity for various needs from live traffic evaluation for usage data mining to improve ranking, spelling etc. In a few years, most Web applications will have the ability to successfully adapt to both the explicit and implicit needs and tastes of their users. Such adaptation requires the ability to model the user's personal goals, interests, preferences and knowledge, and to apply this model while users interact with various applications. While adaptive applications that are based on user modeling have attracted the attention of multiple communities, from AI to UI, there is no forum that specifically focuses on user modeling and adaptive applications in the Web domain.

This workshop will focus on user modeling and the usage of these models in Web applications. The emphasis of the workshop will be on modeling techniques that scale for the Web. User modeling might be based on explicit and implicit user feedback gathered from variety of sources such as sign-on information, clickthrough data, user previous queries, social network, purchases, and real-world activity. Adaptive Web based applications include search personalization, advertisement targeting, recommendation systems, social networks, on-line shopping, etc.
=============================================================
Theme and Topics
Acquiring and inferring the user's model
User profile representation, feature selection
Web and sponsored search personalization
Content filtering
Recommendation of products, friends, UGC, news, and other content
Targeting for display advertising
Segmentation of users for online advertising
Privacy in user modeling
Real-time user modeling
Short term vs. long term user interests
User modeling for fast evolving collections
=============================================================
Important Dates:
December 22, 2010 - Submission
January 10, 2011 - Notification
February 9, 2011 - Workshop
=============================================================
Program Committee:
Mounia Lalmas, University of Glasgow, UK
Wolfgang Nejdl, L3S and University of Hanover, Germany
Sihem Amer-Yahia Yahoo Research?, USA
Qi Guo? Emory University, USA
Ryen W. White, Microsoft Research, USA
Donald Metzler University at southern California, USA
Sandeep Panday Yahoo! Research, USA
David Konopniki IBM Research, Israel
Behshad Behzadi,? Google,?Switzerland

=============================================================
Invited Speakers:
Irwin King -?The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Eytan Adar -?University of Michigan
=============================================================
Submission Guidelines:

Papers should be no longer than 8 pages, including all references and figures. Papers should be submitted in wsdm2011 proceedings format (two columns, 9pt font, approximately one-inch margins), which can be found at:
wsdm2011 Proceeding Templates

All papers must be submitted in either Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), or Microsoft Word Format (doc). Please ensure that any special fonts used are included in the submitted documents. All papers must be original and must not have been published or under review elsewhere.

Best Regards
---------------------------------------------------
David Carmel
Information Retrieval Group
IBM Research Lab, Haifa 31905, Israel
Phone: 972-4-829-6223. Fax: 972-4-829-6116
carmel@il.ibm.com