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Intelligent systems might benefit from automatically detecting when a stimulus has triggered a user's recollection of personal memories, e.g., to identify that a piece of media content holds personal significance for them. While computational research has demonstrated the potential to identify related states based on facial behavior (e.g., mind-wandering), the automatic detection of spontaneous recollections specifically has not been investigated this far. Motivated by this, we present machine learning experiments exploring the feasibility of detecting whether a video clip has triggered personal memories in a viewer based on the analysis of their Head Rotation, Head Position, Eye Gaze, and Facial Expressions. Concretely, we introduce an approach for automatic detection and evaluate its potential for predictions using in-the-wild webcam recordings. Overall, our findings demonstrate the capacity for above chance detections in both settings, with substantially better performance for the video-independent variant. Beyond this, we investigate the role of person-specific recollection biases for predictions of our video-independent models and the importance of specific modalities of facial behavior. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for detecting recollections and user-modeling in adaptive systems.

The ability to automatically infer relevant aspects of human users' thoughts and feelings is crucial for technologies to adapt their behaviors in complex interactions intelligently (e.g., social robots or tutoring systems). Research on multimodal analysis has demonstrated the potential of technology to provide such estimates for a broad range of internal states and processes. However, constructing robust enough approaches for deployment in real-world applications remains an open problem. The MSECP-Wild workshop series serves as a multidisciplinary forum to present and discuss research addressing this challenge. This 4th iteration focuses on addressing varying contextual conditions (e.g., throughout an interaction or across different situations and environments) in intelligent systems as a crucial barrier for more valid real-world predictions and actions. Submissions to the workshop span efforts relevant to multimodal data collection and context-sensitive modeling. These works provide important impulses for discussions of the state-of-the-art and opportunities for future research on these subjects.

Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CARS) are extensions of traditional recommender systems that use information about the context of the user to improve the recommendation accuracy. Whatever the specific algorithm exploited by the CARS, it can provide high-quality recommendations only after having modeled the user and context aspects. Despite the importance of the data models in CARS, nowadays there is a lack of models and tools to support the modeling and management of the data when developing a new CARS, leaving designers, developers and researchers the work of creating their own models, which can be a hard and time-consuming labor, and often resulting in overspecialized or incomplete models. In this paper, we describe GUMCARS - a General User Model for Context-Aware Recommender Systems, where the main goal is to help designers and researchers when creating a CARS by providing an extensive set of User, Context and Item aspects that covers the information needed by different recommendation domains. To validate GUMCARS, two experiments are performed; first, the completeness and generality of the model are evaluated showing encouraging results as the proposal was able to support most of the information loaded from real-world datasets. Then the structural correctness of the model is assessed, the obtained results strongly suggest that the model is correctly constructed according to Object-Oriented design paradigm.

Personalization has a long history, dating back to the 'master-apprentice' approach of individual tutoring that sought to pass on knowledge and skills from one generation to the next. Through user modeling and adaptation, we try to capture the tutor's human intelligence and turn it into artificial intelligence. Over the last decades, this research has evolved from an expert-driven approach toward a data-driven approach. This evolution comes with an interesting challenge: How can we continue to understand what an automated tutor is doing when the process of collecting and interpreting data about users is fully automated and the adaptation and recommendation decisions are 'deduced' from individual users' behavior as well as the behavior of all users combined? This article discusses the challenges of scrutability, repeatability, and meta-adaptation (aka adaptation of the adaptation), important research issues for the coming years.

International audience; As more personal and interactive applications are moving to the cloud, modeling the end-user expectations and satisfaction is becoming necessary for any SaaS provider to survive and thrive in today’s competitive market. However, most of existing works addressing cloud elasticity management adopt a centralized approach where user preferences are mostly overlooked. Based on evidence from the fields of customer expectation management and psychophysics, in this article we propose a personal user model to represent end-user satisfaction and her expectations. To integrate the end-user into the decision loop we develop multi-agent negotiation architecture in which the end-user model is embodied by a personal agent who negotiates on her behalf. The results of the evaluation process show that automated negotiation provides a useful platform to empower the user choices, fulfill her expectations, and maximize her satisfaction hereby outperforming centralized approaches where the provider acts in a unilateral manner.

User satisfaction is becoming a key factor to secure the success of any online service. Quality of Experience is a subjective measure of the service quality as perceived by the user. QoE has been introduced to bridge the gap between the purely technical characteristics of QoS and user satisfaction. Recent research on QoE has shown that QoE is highly personal and influenced by multiple interrelated factors including the user expectations, preferences and cultural background. However, most existing QoE management solutions overlook the personal aspect of QoE and ignore inter-user differences despite the promise of adopting a user-centric approach. In this paper, we propose multi-agent technology as means to achieve personalized QoE-management. In particular, we propose a multi-agent architecture called EMan where each end-user is embodied by an autonomous agent that represents her personal preferences and expectations and seeks to maximize her QoE. To evaluate our approach, we use Repast, a multi-agent simulation platform. The preliminary results proves that such a decentralized multi-agent QoE-management outperforms an equivalent centralized approach both in terms of end-user satisfaction and service acceptability.