Call for papers

Abstract

Following the successful series of PATCH workshops, PATCH 2026 will be again the meeting point between state-of-the-art cultural heritage research and personalization – using any kind of technology, while focusing on ubiquitous and adaptive scenarios, to enhance the personal experience in cultural heritage sites. The workshop is aimed at bringing together, physically and/or virtually, researchers and practitioners who are working on various aspects of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CH/NH) and are interested in exploring the potential of state of the art mobile technology (onsite as well as online) to enhance the CH visit experience. The expected result of the workshop is a sharing and discussing novel ideas and creating a multidisciplinary research agenda that will inform future research directions and hopefully, forge some research collaborations.

Topics

Topics (of interest) include, but are not limited to:

  • Adaptive navigation and browsing in digital and physical CH/NH sites and collections
  • Generative AI for CH/NH
  • Intelligent agents and recommender systems for CH/NH exploration
  • Conversational agents for CH/NH
  • Intelligent user interfaces and gestural interfaces for CH/NH applications
  • Adaptation strategies for text and non-verbal content in CH/NH
  • Natural Language Generation techniques for mobile user modeling in natural and cultural heritage sites
  • Robots, mobile museum guides and personal museum assistants
  • Context-aware information presentation in CH/NH
  • The use of personality to guide CH/NH experiences
  • Integration of virtual and physical collections
  • 3D, Augmented, and Virtual Reality for CH/NH
  • Immersive cultural and natural heritage
  • Short-term, long-term, and group personalization for CH/NH
  • Personalization to author and manage collective CH information
  • Creativity and collaboration support in CH
  • Personalization across the whole of a person's digital ecosystem
  • IoT and Cultural Heritage
  • Living lab in a museum
  • Analysis of behavior patterns to improve CH/NH recommendation
  • Multiple viewpoints and perspectives for CH

Motivation

Personalization, adaptation, and user modeling are central to the UMAP community, and cultural and natural heritage (CH/NH) environments provide a particularly rich and challenging application domain for advancing these research areas. Heritage experiences are inherently complex: they involve diverse users (with different backgrounds, interests, abilities, and motivations), evolving goals over time, dynamic physical and digital contexts, and increasingly hybrid settings that blend on-site, mobile, immersive, and remote interaction. The proliferation of LLMs and GenAI into every aspect of our daily lives, opens new opportunities, as well as poses new challenges for PATCH - how to exploit their benefits while avoiding their risks. These characteristics make CH/NH an ideal testbed for novel theories, methods, and systems in user modeling, adaptation, and personalization.