This June, Boise State computer sciences associate professor Sole Pera and assistant professor Michael Ekstrand, directors of the People and Information Research Team (PIReT), and assistant professor Hoda Mehropoyan, leading the Privacy and ICS Security (PICSS) lab — participated in the 29th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP) from June 21-25, 2021. This conference is the premier international conference for researchers and practitioners working on systems that adapt to individual users, to groups of users, and that collect, represent, and model user information.
This year the faculty presented two research papers. The first, focused on privacy, is entitled “Privacy as a Planned Behaviour: Effects of Situational Factors on Privacy Perceptions and Plans”and is a collaboration involving Boise State’s computer science faculty Mehrpouyan and Ekstrand with Nuhil Mehdy (PhD in computing – Boise State) and Bart Knijnenburg (Clemson University), and examines how people change their privacy positions in different contexts.
The second paper is a collaboration among Pera with Monica Landoni (Università della Svizzera Italiana), Theo Huibers (University of Twente), Emiliana Murgia (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca), and Mohammad Aliannejadi (University of Amsterdam). This contribution, entitled “Right Way, Right Time: Towards a Better Comprehension of Young Students’ Needs when Looking for Relevant Search Results” describes the different requirements and struggles children (aged 10-11) experience when interacting with search engines result pages to complete school assignments.
This year, Michael and Sole also had the privilege of co-chairing two the UMAP’s 2021 tracks:
- Fairness, Transparency, Accountability, and Privacy – Track chairs: Christine Bauer, Michael Ekstrand
- Personalized Recommender Systems – Track chairs: Alejandro Bellogin, Sole Pera, Ludovico Boratto
The work presented was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 16-57774. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.