SEMAIS 2011 - 2nd IUI Workshop on Semantic Models for Adaptive Interactive Systems (SEMAIS 2011)

2nd Workshop

The SEMAIS 2011 Workshop will be held in conjunction with the 2011 International Conference On Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2011) in Palo Alto, CA, USA, in February 2011. The 1st SEMAIS Workshop took place in Hong Kong 2010 in conjunction with IUI 2010. Selected submissions will be published in the Springer HCI Series.
Motivation and goals
Semantic technologies and, in particular, ontologies as formal, shareable representations of a domain of interest play an increasingly important role also for the design and development of user interfaces and more generally interactive systems. Semantic models can serve a number of different purposes in this context. They can be used as application or interface models in model-driven design, generation, and integration of user interfaces. Ontologies may enhance the visualization and interaction capabilities of user interfaces in various ways, e.g., by providing input assistance, intelligently clustering information, or adapting the user interface according to the user’s context. Especially in the latter case, ontologies can be applied for representing the various kinds of context information for context-aware and adaptive systems. In particular, they have promise to provide a technique for representing external physical context factors such as location, time or technical parameters and ‘internal’ context such as user interest profiles or interaction context in a consistent, generalized manner. Owing to these properties, semantic models can also contribute to bridging gaps, e.g., between user models, context-aware interfaces and model-driven UI generation.
There is, therefore, a considerable potential for using semantic models as a basis for adaptive interactive systems. The range of potential adaptations is wide comprising, for example, context- and user-dependent recommendations, interactive assistance when performing application-specific tasks, adaptation of the application functionality, or adaptive retrieval support. Furthermore, a variety of reasoning and machine learning techniques exist, that can be employed to achieve adaptive system behavior.
Topics of interest
Following up the succesfull 1st SEMAIS workshop at IUI 2010, the workshop will address, among others, the following research issues:
Representing user models, systems and their behavior, domain knowledge and interaction context by means of semantic models
Cognitively or neurally founded reasoning techniques such as activation spreading for semantic user models
Context-aware interaction based on semantic models
Adaptation strategies and techniques based on semantic models for e.g. recommender systems, adaptive retrieval, collaboration support systems and others
Generating explanations or visualizations to increase user confidence and support traceability
Scalability and performance of semantic model-based interactive systems.
Semantic model-driven UI development
Generation and evolution of semantic models for interactive systems
Suitability of highly formal vs. light-weight semantic representations
Consuming linked data in user interfaces
Bringing ontologies together with current UI modeling languages, such as UsiXML
Evaluation approaches for adaptive interaction
Submission guidelines
Prospective participants should submit a 2-page position paper describing their interests and work in the topic of the work-shop. First comments on (one or more of) the following topics we intend to discuss at the workshop are also welcome, but not mandatory (additional questions are also welcome):
What are the major challenges (technical, organizational etc.) for developing or generating user interfaces based on semantic models?
For which kinds of systems or applications are semantic models particularly useful?
In which ways will semantic technologies affect user interfaces in the future?
What kinds of context-adaptivity do you see as particularly promising?
How can adaptive model driven user interfaces be evaluated?
We will select participants based on the abstract's quality and the diversity of their backgrounds, aiming at an interdisciplinary group. The selected presenters will be asked to provide an extended 5-page position paper one month before the workshop. These position papers will be circulated in advance for participants to get an understanding of the mutual views and to provide a starting point for the discussion.
Accepted submissions will be published in the Springer HCI Series. Please submit your contributions electronically in PDF format to submissions-AT-semais.org