Call for Papers:

SOCIALIZE Workshop @ UMAP 2026
Sixth Workshop on SOcial and Cultural IntegrAtion with PersonaLIZEd Interfaces (SOCIALIZE 2026)
Co-located with the 34th ACM International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP) 2026
Gothenburg, Sweden

SOCIALIZE WORKSHOP:
June 8, 2026
https://socialize2026.di.unito.it/

UMAP 2026:
June 8-11, 2026
https://www.um.org/umap2026/

IMPORTANT DATES:
Submission deadline: April 9, 2026
Decision notification: April 28, 2026
Camera-ready: May 7, 2026
Workshop date: June 8, 2026

OVERVIEW

The SOCIALIZE workshop aims to explore user modeling, adaptation, and personalization techniques that foster the social and cultural integration of diverse user populations. We specifically intend to attract research that addresses the interaction challenges faced by different groups, with a focus on disadvantaged and at-risk categories (such as refugees and migrants) as well as vulnerable groups (including children, older, autistic, and disabled people).

Additionally, we welcome research on personalized and adaptive human-robot interaction, focusing on social robots that tailor their socially affective behaviors, communication strategies, and collaboration protocols to individual users and group dynamics.

TOPICS

The main topics of the workshop are (but not limited to):

• Multi-cultural system design;
• Empirical studies on the impact of culture on systems;
• Cultural and social influence in online learning platforms (e.g., MOOC);
• Cultural and social influence in recommender systems;
• Cultural and social aspects as contextual factors;
• Cultural and Social Dimensions of Human–AI collaboration;
• Inclusive recommender systems;
• Methods for automatic assessment of social and cultural background from social media;
• Strategies for adapting systems to groups of users with different cultural and social backgrounds;
• Social-cultural integration and adaptation, and large language models;
• Cultural and social situation awareness;
• Cross-cultural analyses of trust in systems;
• Algorithmic bias detection and mitigation for marginalized groups;
• Human-robot interaction (HRI) and adaptation for cross-cultural users, including under-represented groups;
• Humanoid robots and social inclusion;
• Adaptation strategies for social HRI;
• Machine learning for social robots;
• Emotion, personality, and empathy detection in social HRI;
• Social robots as conversational recommender systems;
• Social robots in the real world;
• Social assistive robots (e.g., for elderly people or children with autism spectrum disorder).

SUBMISSIONS

Papers should be submitted via Easychair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=socialize2026) by April 9, 2026. All submissions will undergo a peer-review process. Reviewers will consider originality, significance, technical soundness, clarity, and relevance to the workshop’s topics.

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for and attend the workshop.

The papers accepted at UMAP workshops 2026 will be published in a common proceeding via CEUR-WS

• Paper template (single column): http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-XXX/CEURART.zip
• Regular papers need to be at least ten pages long (single column), including references, to be published in CEUR-WS proceedings, and short papers need to have at least five pages (single column), including references (please see https://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html for more details).

For further questions, please contact the workshop organizers at socialize2026@easychair.org.

ORGANIZATION

Fabio Gasparetti, Roma Tre University, Italy
Cristina Gena, University of Torino, Italy
Styliani Kleanthous, Open University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Giuseppe Sansonetti, Roma Tre University, Italy