UEO 2014 - The Second Workshop on User Engagement Optimization

Online user engagement plays a central role in the business success of many industry companies that own or operate Web sites, apps, and other online systems, including major Web search engines, Web portals, social networking websites, e-commerce systems, and numerous mobile/Web app owners. The key idea of online engagement optimization is to discover and leverage collected knowledge about the behavioral patterns of online engagement and provide features, functionality and experiences accordingly to attract users’ involvement, facilitate their interaction and enhance the long-term satisfaction. Study on this topic raises tremendous challenges to many disciplines, yet most of which we believe have to date been under-explored. For instance, how to measure user engagement and its quality (both short-term and long-term) based on online user traffic? What’re good metrics for different tasks (e.g., monitoring, control and intervention)? What is the guideline for metric design? How to discover reliable knowledge about the users, their interests and behavioral patterns and provide customized features or resources that are tailored or targeted towards their specific needs? How to develop models, algorithms and implementations that are effective in handling online user engagement data that are noisy, sparse and incomplete in nature and in the same time scalable to the extensive availability and scale of such data. How to tune, test and validate a specific intervention or design decision based on time-drifting online traffic? How to mitigate the effects of exogenous factors? How to make sense or discover insights from user engagement data to facilitate the design of an intervention or justify the outcome of a particular intervention or design decision?
This workshop aims to connect academic researchers and industrial practitioners who are working on or interested in online engagement optimization. The goal is to provide a forum for industrial practitioners to expose real-world challenges to academic communities and for academic researchers to popularize state-of-art research outcomes to industrial practitioners, and foster collaboration between the two. The workshop will be a full-day events consisting of invited talks of academic research advances and industrial technical showcases on related topics with presentations from contributed submissions.
The workshop topics include but are not limited to:
Online experiments
Design effective online experiments
Consider social network effects
Theoretical study and empirical analysis of online experiments
Metrics and measurements
Long-term user engagement metrics
Psychological, sociological, and cultural factors in metrics
Interplay between short-term metrics (e.g., CTR) and long-term measurements
User modeling, personalization and targeting
Novel user models
Recommendation and personalization algorithms
Behavior targeting
Machine learning for streaming data
Online learning
Streaming algorithms
Novel large-scale learning frameworks
Visualization and interpretation
Effective data visualization
Data visualization on large scale data
The workshop will include a number of invited speakers from leading industrial companies as well as academic researchers. A presentation session is prepared for contributed submissions. The schedule will provide time for both organized and open discussion.