**** Apologies for cross postings ****

Workshop on Surprise, Opposition, and Obstruction in Adaptive and 
Personalized Systems
(SOAP)
held in conjunction with UMAP 2016, July 13-17, Halifax, NS, Canada.

https://soapworkshop2016.wordpress.com

*Extended submission deadline: May 16, 2016*

Last Call for Position, Short and Long Papers

The phenomenon often referred to as the "filter-bubble", i.e., the 
effect that
collaborative, as well as content-based recommender systems keep making 
obvious,
uninspiring, and therefore disengaging suggestions based on previous 
interactions, has
emphasized the value of system qualities beyond pure accuracy, e.g., 
diversity, novelty,
serendipity, or unexpectedness, to keep the user satisfied. In addition 
to these, in this
workshop, we want to explore concepts beyond these qualities, namely 
surprise,
opposition, and obstruction. Surprise relates to existing concepts like 
serendipity in
complex scenarios. Opposition, as an extreme form of variation, is 
highly subjective and
context-dependent. Obstruction refers to the intentional restriction of 
functionality
through the machine in an active manner by "embodying opposition". We 
are interested in
these aspects in the context of personalized and adaptive systems, such 
as recommender
systems, user modeling, e.g., through personality-based preference 
models, and creative
processes, such as music making, that are facilitated through 
collaborations with
intelligent machines and their effect on creative output.
(More details can be found at 
https://soapworkshop2016.wordpress.com/background/)

Topics of Interest:
-------------------
- Surprise and unexpectedness in retrieval and recommender systems
- Serendipity, diversity, and novelty
- User-centric evaluation studies on aspects of diversity and serendipity
- Inspirational recommender systems
- Aspects of personalization in inspirational systems
- Formal models of creativity
- User models dealing with opposition and "otherness"
- The roles of chance and randomness in intelligent and user-adaptive 
systems
- Imitation, subversion, and opposition in creative and cooperative systems
- Learning to variate
- Models for obstruction in collaborative scenarios
- Case studies of intelligent systems in creative domains, e.g., music 
creation
     - Automatic improvisation and variation systems
     - Intelligent accompaniment
     - Personalized sound quality verbalization and semantic embeddings
     - Sound retrieval for music creators


Important Dates and Submission Format:
--------------------------------------
Workshop paper submission deadline: May 16, 2016
Notification to authors: June 1, 2016
Camera-ready paper: June 7, 2016
Publication of electronic proceedings: June 30, 2016

The SOAP workshop will be held in a mini-conference style. Based on the 
recency of the
above mentioned developments in recommender systems, music creation, and 
even
computational creativity research, we consider this to be a breaking 
topic highly
relevant to the UMAP community and beyond. We ask prospective 
participants to submit a
paper detailing their position or technical contribution with regard to 
the questions
discussed above prior to the workshop. To this end, we allow for different
types of paper entries (non-anonymized, all in the main conference's ACM 
format):

- position paper (extended abstract, up to 4 pages)
- technical short paper (up to 6 pages)
- technical full paper (up to 10 pages)

Submissions are to be made through the SOAP submission website on EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sooap2016

Submissions will be reviewed by at least three members of the program 
committee to select
participants. Authors of accepted submissions will be required to give a 
short
presentation at the workshop. Accepted submissions will be compiled and 
published as
online proceedings through CEUR-WS.org in the UMAP 2016 Extended 
Proceedings.

Organizers:
-----------
Peter Knees, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Kristina Andersen, STEIM, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Alan Said, Recorded Future, Gothenburg, Sweden
Marko Tkalčič, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Contact: soapworkshop2016 AT easychair DOT org





-- 
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Dr. Marko Tkalcic
mailto:[log in to unmask]
http://markotkalcic.wordpress.com
Skype : markotkalcic
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/RecSysMare
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/markotkalcic
Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=JQ2puysAAAAJ
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