Call for Papers User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research Special Issue on User Modelling to Support Groups, Communities and Collaboration http://www.ia.uned.es/~elena/umuai-special-issue/

Brief Description

Multi-user environments provide the necessary tools to allow individuals to communicate and share information. Examples of such environments can be found in computer supported collaborative work, learning management systems, communities of common interests, and peer-to-peer systems.

Because of the great number and diversity of users and types of information, the system should facilitate users' interaction. Supporting users in multi-user adaptive environments requires an understanding of the interaction that takes place, which is shaped not only by the individuals' characteristics, but also the group members' individual behaviors, their relationships, and the dynamics of their interaction.

The new information to be represented includes information about the users and groups, and the collaboration and relationships between users. These models could then be used for different purposes (e.g.,supporting collaboration, supporting group awareness in multi-user environments and sustainability of groups) and in different areas (e.g. collaborative environments, communities of common interest or multi-agent environments).

To encourage researchers to report on the construction and application of user models and group models, we are calling for contributions to a special issue of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction: The Journal of Personalization Research (UMUAI) .

Topics of interests include, but are not limited to: group model specifications, usage data acquisition and representation, analysis of interactions, modeling social relationships in groups, support for coordination in cooperative multi-agent systems, support for coordination, motivation and group decision in collaborative environments, multi-user plan recognition, evaluation of collaboration within multi-user collaborative scenarios, social network learning and analysis, analysis of interactions within peer-to-peer environments, and support to group awareness.

About UMUAI

User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction (UMUAI) publishes mature and substantiated research results on the (dynamic) adaptation of computer systems to their human users, and the role that the system's model of the user plays in this context. Papers that present untested research ideas are not ready to be submitted to UMUAI. Instead, these ideas should first be presented at workshops to get feedback from colleagues. Once you can demonstrate ideas that are backed up by results, then they are ready for UMUAI. These results may be generated by building a (partial) computer implementation and from that, either analyze its behavior, run empirical experiments, or analyze the idea using formal means. Many articles in UMUAI are therefore quite comprehensive and describe the results of several years of work. Consequently, UMUAI gives "unlimited" space to authors (as long as what they write is important) and also does not mind if research that is being submitted to UMUAI has been previously published in bits and pieces at workshops and conferences (as long as the synthesis provides significant new insights). 

UMUAI has been published since 1991 by Kluwer Academic Publishers (now merged with Springer Verlag). Based on the ISI impact factor, the journal is currently ranked #6 among 451 Computer Science journals (#20 in 2002).

Submissions

Detailed instructions for the submission of manuscripts can be found via the journal home page http://www.umuai.org. When submitting, please make it clear that your manuscript is to be considered for the special issue on User Modelling to support groups, communties and collaboration. 

Potential authors are encouraged to submit a tentative title and abstract to the guest editors by Sept. 1, 2005. This information will help us to advise authors on the suitability of the planned paper, and will help the journal to set up a well-qualified team of reviewers for the issue and to send further relevant information to authors as it becomes available.

*****SUBMISSION DEADLINE OCTOBER 1, 2005******

Review Process

Submissions will undergo the normal review process, and will be reviewed by three established researchers selected from a panel of reviewers formed for the special issue.

Guest Editors