Abstract: Nowadays, personalization has garnered significant traction in the context of smart environments collectively termed Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS). CPSS encompasses physical spaces such as smart cities, smart homes, schools, offices, museums, and factories where humans and sensor-enabled “intelligent devices” coexist. As these environments are continuously evolving in complexity, personalization presents both a promise and a challenge. In this talk, I discuss practices for designing personalization in dynamic interactive environments. Specifically, I focus on both scenarios that require knowing where to apply pure personalization and ones that necessitate departing from a sole optimization of user satisfaction to bring multi-stakeholder awareness. I showcase my recent research leveraging computational methods and machine learning algorithms to demonstrate how the challenges of implementing personalization in dynamic CPSS environments can be tackled. Particularly, I present a smart museum scenario which features a case study from the National Gallery in London. I discuss our findings from a small-scale and a large-scale user-centric evaluation highlighting how this research contributes to our understanding of delivering personalized content in dynamic environments, its implications and explain how it can benefit other domains where personalization has gained momentum.

Bio: Dr. Bereket Yilma is a Computer Scientist specializing in optimization and applied Machine Learning. He holds a PhD in Automatic Signal and Image Processing, and Computer Engineering. Currently, he works as a researcher within Computational Interaction (COIN) group at the University of Luxembourg and is a Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science. He also serves as the instructor of Recommender Systems in the Doctoral School of Computer Science and Computer Engineering. His research focuses on various aspects of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, including Recommender Systems, Adaptive User Interfaces, and Personalization in the context of Smart Interactive Environments aka Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS). He also actively contributes to Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) research within the framework of the BANANA project, Brainsourcing for Affective Attention Estimation. As an Associate Chair of SIGCHI, Dr. Yilma plays a key role in the HCI community. He is an Instructor at the SIGCHI CIX Summer Schools and serves as a PC member and reviewer for flagship HCI/ML venues, and ACM Conferences, such as CIKM, IUI, SIGIR, AAAI, LOD, ICML, ICLR, and NeurIPS.