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CFP: WSDM 2011 Workshop - UMWA2011: User Modeling for

Web Applications
http://research.yahoo.com/workshops/umwa2011/
Hong Kong, China, Feb 9, 2011
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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

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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
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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.
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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
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Important Dates:

• December 22, 2010 - Submission

• January 10, 2011 - Notification
• February 9, 2011 - Workshop

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Program Committee:

• Mounia Lalmas, University of Glasgow, UK

• Wolfgang Nejdl,
Hanover, Germany
• Sihem Amer-Yahia
• Qi Guo
• Ryen W. White,
• Donald Metzler
California, USA
• Sandeep Panday
• David Konopniki
• Behshad Behzadi,
L3S and University of
Yahoo Research , USA
Emory University, USA
Microsoft Research, USA
University at southern
Yahoo! Research, USA
IBM Research, Israel
Google, Switzerland

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Invited Speakers:

• Irwin King - The Chinese University of Hong Kong

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• Eytan Adar - University of Michigan

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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.