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Call for papers

The SOCIALIZE workshop aims to bring together those interested in the development of interactive techniques, including social robots, that may foster the social and cultural inclusion of a broad range of users, with a focus on vulnerable groups (e.g., children, elderly, autistic, and disabled people) and disadvantaged, at-risk categories (e.g., refugees and migrants).

  • Multi-cultural and social system design;
  • Empirical studies on the impact of culture and social aspects on systems;
  • Information retrieval and filtering techniques for vulnerable and disadvantaged people;
  • Cultural and social influence in recommender systems;
  • Cultural and social aspects as contextual factors;
  • Inclusive recommender systems;
  • Cultural and social influence in online learning platforms (e.g., MOOC);
  • Methods for automatic assessment of social and cultural background from social media;
  • Strategies for adapting systems to groups of users with different backgrounds;
  • Social-cultural integration and large language models;
  • Cultural and social situation awareness;
  • Cross-cultural analyses of trust in systems;
  • Human-robot adaptation for cross-cultural users, including under-represented groups;
  • Personalized Human-Robot Interaction (HRI);
  • Adaptation strategies for social HRI;
  • Emotion, personality, and empathy detection in social HRI;
  • Machine learning for social robots;
  • 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);
  • Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cultural and social inclusion;
  • Algorithmic bias detection and mitigation for marginalized groups;
  • ...

@UMAP 2026 Conference

Gothenburg, Sweden

March 24th, 2026

Invited speakers

Long, short and position papers' presentation

Discussions and exchanges

Don’t miss it!

PROGRAM

Final program

SCIENTIFIC COMMITEE

Scientific Chairs

Giuseppe Sansonetti, University of Roma 3, Italy
Fabio Gasparetti, University of Roma 3, Italy
Cristina Gena, University of Torino, Italy
Styliani Kleanthous, Open University of Cyprus, Cyprus

Fabio Gasparetti

University of Roma 3, Italy

Giuseppe Sansonetti

Università di Roma 3, Italy

Cristina Gena

Università of Torino, Italy

Styliani Kleanthous

Open University of Cyprus

Program Commitee

* Liliana Ardissono, University of Torino
* Federica Cena, University of Torino
* Rossana Damiano, University of Torino
* Berardina De Carolis, University of Bari
* Bruce Ferwerda, Jonkoping University
* Tsvi Kuflik, University of Haifa
* Pasquale Lops, University of Bari
* Noemi Mauro, University of Torino* Hebatallah Mohamed, Ca' Foscari University of Venice
* Cataldo Musto, University of Bari
* Olga C. Santos, UNED
* Nava Tintarev, TU Delft
* Christoph Trattner, University of Bergen
* Massimo Zancanaro, University of Trento
* Mehdi Elahi, University of Bergen
* Rosella Gennari, FUBolzano
* Anna Di Pace, University of Modena e Reggio Emilia
* Mauro Mezzini, University of Roma TRE


Submission

Submission deadline: April 9, 2026:
April 28, 2026: notification to authors
May 7, 2026: camera-ready due
June 8, 2026: workshop date

Important note: Starting from UMAP 2026, workshop papers are NOT published in the ACM proceedings. All workshop papers will be published in a single CEUR-WS proceedings volume, prepared jointly by the Proceedings Chairs and the workshop organizers.

Page limits:

  • Regular papers: 10 or more standard pages, including references;
  • Short papers: 5–9 standard pages, including references;
  • Poster papers: less than 5 standard pages, including references. Poster papers must be handled as abstracts, following the CEUR guidelines: https://ceur-ws.org/HOWTOSUBMIT.html#PUBLISH-RULES

Papers that exceed the page limits or formatting guidelines will be returned without review.

Submissions should be single blinded, i.e. authors names should be included in the submissions.

CEUR Templates and Formatting.

NB: Accepted papers will require a further revision in order to meet the requirements and page limits of the camera-ready format required by CEUR-WS. Instructions for the preparation of the camera-ready versions of the papers will be provided after acceptance. 

An international panel of experts will review all submissions.

Work that has already been published should not be submitted unless it introduces a significant addition to the previously published work.

Contact us

socialize2026@easychair.org