ABIS is an international workshop organized by the SIG on Adaptivity and User Modeling in Interactive Software Systems of the German Gesellschaft für Informatik. For more than 30 years, the ABIS workshop has served as a highly interactive forum for discussing the state of the art in personalization, user modeling, and related areas. The 2026 edition will focus on personalization and recommendations, with particular attention to adaptation on the Web and its societal effects. To explore and discuss the effects of the adaptive Web on society, the workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to share insights and discuss emerging findings and future developments. Our goal is to identify current trends, newly observed effects, and future research directions, with the overarching aim of fostering the development of this discipline and encouraging new collaborations.

Workshop Mode and Activities

This workshop focuses strongly on the societal effects of adaptive (web) technologies, which provides a more precise scope for potential contributions than the workshops conducted by ABIS before. We aim to attract researchers and practitioners from the WebSci community and gather their insights and knowledge in this context, which is highly important and interesting to us. This year's ABIS workshop is planned as a half-day, interactive on-site event in conjunction with the WebSci 2026 conference in Braunschweig, Germany. The workshop will be split into two parts: The first part of the workshop will be devoted to the presentation of scientific work addressing concepts, ongoing developments, and empirical evaluations within the thematic scope.The second part of the workshop will focus on networking and, in particular, discussing a research agenda based on the scientific contributions. We plan to gather key insights and discuss them in small groups to identify trends and potential future directions or collaborations. This will be summarized and made accessible via this ABIS website.

Topics

The workshop welcomes a range of topics of interest concerning the adaptive Web and its effects on society, including but not limited to:

• Personalization and Recommendation: Personalization applications exist across various domains, from e-learning to online retail, automotive domains, assistance for the elderly or handicapped, or mobile computing scenarios. What are suitable use cases for meaningful personalization? What uniform patterns are visible across domains?
• AI-fueled Personalization: By leveraging the large amounts of available data, AI has the potential to enhance existing personalization approaches across various domains. What can recent advances in AI (e.g., LLMs) bring to the table when it comes to personalization? What risks does AI bring to personalization efforts and, in combination, to society?
• Moving the Needle on the Reality/Virtuality Continuum: Emerging technologies such as AI tools, AR, VR, and XR increasingly blur the lines between online and offline experiences. Personalization may help users navigate this continuum and support more effective joint interactions. This raises the question of what societal risks or challenges emerge when hybrid environments become increasingly personalized, and how these developments may change social dynamics.
• Personalization for Groups: Personalized support for groups can help in our contemporary, inter-connected workplaces: topics include adaptive ad-hoc support for meetings, suggestions of suitable collaboration partners, and similar approaches (for an overview, see [6])
• Adaptive Support for Learning and Teaching: Tailored learning experiences can benefit knowledge acquisition and learning. However, adaptive supports should account for a range of factors, including individual learning styles and collaborative environments. What are the methods and tools for individual and collaborative learning support, and how do they affect the users?
• Serendipity, Bubbles, and Long Tail: Personalization is in latent danger of strictly limiting content to individual preferences, effectively preventing the chance to find interesting items that are part of the long tail. What can be done to avoid the resulting bubbles?
• Privacy Issues: With advances in personalization, users' concerns over transparency, user control, and data scrutability become even more important to address. How can personalization systems provide transparency and ensure ethical, privacy-compliant use of the data without overwhelming users with complexity?

Call for Participation & Submission Guidelines

We invite participation in the ABIS 2026 half-day workshop on adaptivity and user modeling, which is held on-site in conjunction with the WebSci 2026 conference in Braunschweig, Germany. The target audience of the workshop is, for instance, Web Science and HCI practitioners and developers, as well as researchers, including PhD students. The goals of this workshop are 1) strengthening the community of researchers (also within the German Gesellschaft für Informatik) and the HCI section for this important and emerging area of research by fostering knowledge exchange and facilitating networking, 2) providing a platform to present and discuss scientific work on recent developments relevant with respect to the topics of the workshop, and 3) discussing a research agenda for future work on managing risks concerning personalization and adaptation approaches in these diverse fields.

The workshop will be open to everyone interested; no submission is required. However, we encourage non-anonymous submissions via EasyChair in the ACM double-column format.

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

• Full papers: 4-6 pages, excluding references.
• Demo papers: 1-2 pages, excluding references.
• Late-breaking work: 2-4 pages, excluding references.

Papers will be peer-reviewed by at least two reviewers (single-blind).

Accepted workshop papers will be published in the WebSci proceedings, as a companion volume in the ACM Digital Library. Authors of accepted demos, late-breaking work, and full papers will be invited to present their work orally at the workshop, including a discussion with the audience. At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop and must register for at least one day of the conference. Please consider: Authors of institutes that are not part of ACM Open would have to pay an Article Processing Charge (except for posters and other 2-pagers).

Important dates

• 17 March: submission deadline for all paper types
• 31 March: author notifications
• 14 April: camera-ready deadline (this is a strict deadline)
• 26 May: workshop

Organizers

The 2026 edition of the workshop will be organized by the following members of the SIG ABIS:

• Laura Stojko is a PostDoc at the Chair of Software Security at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich in Germany. Her research focuses on security and privacy in personalized systems and on personalizing security and privacy measures.
• Eelco Herder is an associate professor in the Interaction Group at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His research focuses on how users and current (commercial) recommender systems respond to one another, and which mechanisms help to encourage users to actively choose what they want instead of passively following suggestions.
• Jannis Strecker-Bischoff is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. He studies how ubiquitous personalization systems can make people’s interactions with their environment more efficient, safer and more inclusive, and how these systems can be built in a responsible and societally beneficial way.
• Julia Seitz is a post-doctoral researcher at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. Her research focuses on how biosignals can be used to detect negative user states in video meetings and how adaptive support interventions can be designed based on these biosignals.
• Thomas Neumayr is a PostDoc-level assistant professor with the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. One of his main research interests is the intersection between personalization, HCI, and CSCW.
• Enes Yigitbas is competence area manager for "Human-Centered Digitality" at Software Innovation Lab of Paderborn University, Germany. His main research interests are at the intersection of HCI, Software Engineering, and Machine Learning, especially focusing on the design, development, and evaluation of XR-based learning and assistance systems
• Mirjam Augstein is a professor for Personalized and Collaborative Systems at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Her main research interests are related to personalized and collaborative interaction, including adaptive support for individuals and teams in interactive environments.