UMAP2016 Travel Report

This week, I attended the 24th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP 2016). This year, it held in conjunction with Hypertext Conference sharing some sessions (e.g., Doctoral Consortium, Keynote speakers). Overall, there were around 130 participants for the conference. This year, the conference received 123 submissions with a 28 % acceptance rate. 

#umap2016 review process and stats by @laroyo and @julitav pic.twitter.com/N4ZWFhaXBA

— UMAP (@UMAPconf) July 13, 2016

A major change in this year was the presentation format. Different from previous years, we present 13 mins (long), 8 mins (short) with a poster session to receive more audiences and discussions.

• Keynote Speakers:

The first keynote speaker was Hossein Derakhshan: Killing the Hyperlink, Killing the Web: the Shift from Library-Internet to Television-Internet.

The speaker is an Iranian-Canadian blogger who was imprisoned in Tehran from November 2008 to November 2014. He is credited with starting the blogging revolution in Iran and is called the father of Persian blogging by many journalists.

“The Web We Have to Save” by @h0d3r https://t.co/Nk5wCYHHAm #umap2016

— Guangyuan Piao (@parklize) July 13, 2016

Some impressive phrases during the speech:

- Many internet users in Brazil and India think Facebook is the Internet
- With 150 "likes", Facebook can know better about you than your parents, with 300 likes, the service can know better you than your spouse

The second speaker Lada Adamic, who is leading the Product Science group within Facebook's Data Science Team.

The speaker described three large-scale analyses of re-share cascades on Facebook, which were performed in aggregate using de-identified data.

Now @ladamic telling as about dynamics of information sharing as meme mutation/variation #umap2016 pic.twitter.com/gwRrsEKO99

— UMAP (@UMAPconf) July 14, 2016

Summaries of the speech:

- Cascades grow

- Cascades recur

- Cascades evolve

The third speaker Sandra Carberry, who is one of the founders of the User Modeling research area at the first woskshop in Maria Laach, 1986, gave a talk on "User Modeling: the Past, the Present and the Future".

Prof. Sandra Carberry' keynote "User Modeling: the Past, the Present and the Future" #umap2016 pic.twitter.com/lxiaJXVsYC

— Julita Vassileva (@julitav) July 15, 2016

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I was there to present a short paper, a doctoral consortium paper and an extended abstract.

• Short Paper

UMAP2016 - Analyzing Aggregated Semantics-enabled User Modeling on Google+ and Twitter for Personalized Link Recommendations from GUANGYUAN PIAO

• Doctoral Consortium 

Several Twitter & RecSys papers at the HT+UMAP DC session #umap2016 #acmht16 room 140 pic.twitter.com/PiC67Mirfd

— UMAP (@UMAPconf) July 13, 2016

In the Doctoral Consortium, each student was assigned an expert in your topic. Tsvika Kuflik, who is on the editorial board of UMUAI, was my mentor during the conference and offered many constructive feedbacks about my thesis. 

•  Extended Abstract

This preliminary work describes a first step of user modeling using different fields of LinkedIn profiles to investigate which field of LinkedIn profiles can be helpful for user modeling in the context of MOOC recommendations.

UMAP2016EA - Analyzing MOOC Entries of Professionals on LinkedIn for User Modeling and Personalized MOOC Recommendations from GUANGYUAN PIAO

Many audiences asked about data collection. We used Google Customized Search Engine to search the LinkedIn website using a specific keyword like "coursera" to filter out LinkedIn profiles containing Coursera courses. For the details about the dataset, you can check the post here.

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Impressively, the proceedings of UMAP 2016 have been available during the conference.