The new (as of May 2008) Data Mining and User Modeling Research group at Telefonica Research (TID) in Madrid, Spain, is led by Nuria Oliver and focuses on human-centered approaches to data analysis for user modeling, and algorithms and applications for personalization, decision support, and business intelligence. The group emphasizes principled data analysis taking transdisciplinary approaches that consider socio-cultural context, cognitive abilities, psychological factors, and personal preferences. We view user modeling as a central component in the larger interdisciplinary field of Human-Centered Computing, which is broadly concerned with computing and computational artifacts as they relate to the human condition.

Our group works closely with Telefonica R&D engineering teams on applied research solutions to benefit users of the Telefonica Group´s products and services worldwide, as well as on break-through innovative long term research that will shape the way technology impacts society from a human-centered perspective. We are very interested in societal aspects of computing, in particular in how modeling human behaviour can impact the development and implementation of algorithms and systems and on the implications this can have on technology for development.

The creation of this group at Telefonica I+D is part of a new effort by Telefonica to emphasize long term scientific research, thus the group differs in structure and goals from the traditional teams in existence in the Telefonica group.

Research Areas

			AI and Data Mining: Behavioural pattern recognition, social network analysis, interactive, online and visual data mining, machine learning for information extraction and integration, probabilistic, and model-based reasoning, ontology and knowledge representation, security and privacy aspects in the management of user data.
			User Modeling: Acquisition, elicitation, representation, reasoning, and management of preferences, profiles, and user models (individual, group) in fixed and ubiquitous environments; cognitive, socio-cultural, and contextual modeling, social anthropology and ethnographic praxis design.
			Personalization and recommendations: Individual, community, and task-oriented personalization of content, interfaces, and information access, intelligent approaches to automated product model/data extraction, algorithms for recommendation and their applications, configurable products, and mash-up configurations.
			Human-Centered Business Intelligence: Optimization, business forecasting, planning, and trend-spotting, adaptive decision support, intelligent agents, analytical CRM (analysis of customer behaviour to aid product and service decision making).

News

September

			Our paper on user modeling granuarity has been accepted at the International IEEE/WIC/ACM Conference on Web Intelligence (WI 2008), Dec. 9-12, Syndey, Australia.
			A. Jaimes, co-chair, late breaking results track (new!) at the 2nd International ACM Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2009), February 9-12, 2009, Barcelona, Spain.
			A. Jaimes, Industrial track co-chair, International Conference on User Modeling and Personalization (UMAP 2009) June 22-26,2009 in Trento, Italy. The biennial conference series User Modeling (UM, 1986–2007) and Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems (AH, 2000–2008) have been merged into the annual conference series User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP).
			A. Jaimes, panels chair, 15th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2009), June 28-July 1, 2009, Paris, France.
			A. Jaimes, demonstrations chair at the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML-PKDD 2009), Sept. 7-11, Bled, Slovenia.

May

			Alejandro Jaimes is editorial board member and new area chair for Human-Centered Computing of IEEE Computer Magazine . The new column will feature articles by leading scientists, researchers, and practitioners on important HCC topics.

June

			Alejandro Jaimes will give a Keynote speech at DAGM 2008 (30th Annual Symposium of the German Association for Pattern Recognition), Munich, Germany, June 10-13, 2008. The topic of the talk will be “Human Pattern Analysis from Face-to-Face Processing to Social Mining.”
			We will participate in the Dagstuhl seminar on Contextual and Social Media Understanding and Usage, June 2008. Dagstuhl seminars “bring together internationally renowned leading scientists for the purpose of exploring a cutting-edge informatics topic.”

August

			We are organizing the the 9th Intl. Workshop on Multimedia Data Mining in conjunction with KDD 2008 , Las Vegas, USA, August 24th, 2008.

October

			Alejandro Jaimes is program chair of ACM Multimedia 2008 (Human-Centered Multimedia track) and will participate in the SIG ACM Multimedia Strategic Retreat 2008, and has been invited to the panel on "Connecting Artists and Scientists in Multimedia Research" at the same conference.

Careers & Collaboration Opportunities

We have several openings for research scientists, post-docs, interns, and visiting professors. We are looking for highly creative and dynamic individuals with a b technical background and a human-centered vision on technology. If you are enthusiastic about the topics above, have international experience, a b publication record, and a desire to carry out high-quality research in an open environment with the aim of having a lasting impact, please contact us (mailto:careers.research@tid.es and please place DMUM in the subject field).