UMAP 2019 Workshop on Explainable and Holistic User Modeling (ExHUM) Chairs' Welcome & Organization

Abstract

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the UMAP 2019 Workshop on Explainable and Holisitic User Modeling (ExHUM). Our workshop took inspiration from the analysis of the recent Web dynamics: according to a recent claim by IBM, 90% of the data available today have been created in the last two years. Such an exponential growth of personal information has given new life to research in the area of user modelling, since information about users' preferences, sentiment and opinions, as well as signals describing their physical and psychological state, can now be obtained by mining data gathered from many heterogeneous sources. How can we use such data to drive personalization and adaptation mechanisms? How can we effectively merge such data to obtain a holistic representation of all (or some of) the facets describing people? Moreover, as the importance of such technologies in our everyday lives grows, it is also fundamental that the internal mechanisms that guide personalization algorithms are as clear as possible. It is not by chance that the recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) emphasized the users' right to explanation when people face machine learning-based systems. Unfortunately, the current research tends to go in the opposite direction, since most of the approaches try to maximize the effectiveness of the personalization strategy (e.g., recommendation accuracy) at the expense of the explainability and the transparency of the model.