****** Please, excuse cross-postings *********
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CALL FOR PAPERS
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Workshop on
User and Group models for web-based adaptive collaborative environments
In conjunction with UM2003
June 22, 2003
Conference Center of the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, USA
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Web page: http://www.ia.uned.es/~elena/um03-ws/
Background and Motivation
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Nowadays, web-based collaborative environments benefits from improved
communication services. However, the mere fact of setting up an
environment for users does not guarantee mutual collaboration or
cooperative work.
Developing successful collaborative environments is not
trivial. Successful collaborative environments satisfy their members'
needs and contribute to the well-being of the group. In order to adapt
to the users' and group needs, and to improve the collaboration within
the group, it is desirable to design some kind of user and group
models describing, for example, the users' characteristics, roles and
collaborative activities.
Such user models are already successfully applied in many web-based
adaptive systems, as we have been seen in the conferences within the
User Modeling and Adaptive Hypermedia research area. And group models
have also been successfully applied within the CSCW (Computer Support
Collaborative Work) research area.
One of the issues for collaboration and group models developed within
CSCW, is that they are limited to restricted environments, so it is
hard to add new services or new collaborative activities to these
models. In addition, the systems in this research area generally do
not consider the usual techniques from the user modelling community in
order to make the user and group models perform dynamically for these
collaborative tasks. An approximation focused on the user must bear in
mind both current and future behaviour of all user types, and the fact
that users' objectives or intentions may change as they interact with
the system. Moreover, CSCW systems may benefit from multi-user models
that take into account the varied dynamic interactions between
users. For instance, multi-user modeling components in a CSCW system
may tailor their collaboration support to the general patterns of
communications that take place, or they may help users identify the
organizational roles within the team.
Thus, the objective of this workshop is two-fold. On the one hand, we
would like to extend the user models proposed in traditional web-based
adaptive systems so that they can consider the interaction within
collaborative environments, support group decision making, perform
multi-user plan recognition, etc.. On the other hand, we need to bear
in mind the dynamic behaviour in these environments (e.g. new
communication services, new users).
Topics of interests include, but not limited to: group models
specifications, usage data acquisition, analysis of interactions,
usage data representation, preferences for collaborations, models for
collaborative tasks, machine learning tasks for group models, user and
group models for knowledge management systems, multi-user plan
recognition, ...
Questions to be addressed
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Issues to be discussed in this workshop will be:
* Should there be an explicit group model or a dynamic combination of
individual models as needed?
* What types of characteristics can be considered in the model as
objective indicators of the collaboration between users (for
example, level of participation)?
* How do we use multi-user models to enhance collaboration?
* What kind of user, usage and environment data are needed in order to
obtain the indicators of the collaboration (e.g. number of messages
to a particular forum, etc.)? How do we match observed interactions
with multi-user models?
* What algorithms can we use to learn models of the interactions of
multiple users in a team or group?
* How should we model the collaborative activities in a web-based
adaptive collaborative environment?
* How to mediate between conflicting user interests?
* How to take into account social aspects within a group?
Format
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The intended duration for the workshop is a full day. The workshop
will have a question-oriented organization rather than miniconference
organization. As the organizers want to promote discussion and
cooperation and discussion, the size of the audience will be limited
to 10 or 15 presentations. These presentations will be selected based
on their quality and accordance to the questions to be addressed.
Program Committee
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* Amy Soller http://sra.itc.it/people/soller/
* Lakhim .C.Jain http://www.unisa.edu.au/pes/kes/
* Ricardo Conejo http://polaris.lcc.uma.es/~conejo/
* Rob Koper http://eml.ou.nl/introduction/articles.htm
* Daniel Borrajo http://scalab.uc3m.es/~dborrajo/
* Aurora Vizcaíno http://zeus.inf-cr.uclm.es/www/avizcain/
* Alejandra Martínez http://www.infor.uva.es/~amartine/
* Manuel Ortega Cantero http://chico.inf-cr.uclm.es/
* Jaakko Kurhila http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kurhila/
* Maria Barra http://isis.dia.unisa.it/
* Felisa Verdejo http://sensei.lsi.uned.es/LT/
* Beatriz Barros http://sensei.lsi.uned.es/~bbarros/
* Luis Talavera http://www.lsi.upc.es/~talavera/
Organizers
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Elena Gaudioso [log in to unmask] (http://www.ia.uned.es/personal/elena/)
Jesús G. Boticario [log in to unmask] (http://www.ia.uned.es/personal/jgb/)
Mathias Bauer [log in to unmask] (http://www.dfki.de/~bauer)
Gal Kaminka [log in to unmask] (http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~galk/)
Important dates
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Papers submission: 3 March
Acceptance Notification: 31 March
Camera-ready papers: 25 April
Workshop: 22 June
Submissions
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In order to get an early estimate of the possible attendance, we would
appreciate that you send an email to some of the organizers indicating
whether you intend to submit a paper. Of course, by doing so, you make
no commitment whatsoever.
Submissions should not exceed 10 pages and should be formatted
according to the guidelines used for the papers of the main conference
(see http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~um2003/). Please, submit your paper by
e-mail to Elena Gaudioso ([log in to unmask]) until March 3,
2003. Postscript (*.ps) and Portable Document Format (*.pdf) files are
preferred.
Registration
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Workshop participants are not required to register for the whole
conference, but may register for the workshop only
(http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~um2003).
--
Elena Gaudioso Phone: +34-1-3988450
Dpto. Inteligencia Artificial Fax: +34-1-3986697
UNED. Senda del Rey 9 mailto:[log in to unmask]
28040 Madrid. Spain