Tutorial
"Engineering Intelligent Adaptive User Interfaces: From Personalization to Human–AI Collaboration"
Abstract: Artificial intelligence is opening new possibilities for user interfaces that can adapt dynamically to users, their behavior, and the context of interaction. However, intelligent adaptation also raises important challenges related to user control, transparency, trust, and the engineering of systems that evolve during use.
In this tutorial, I will discuss emerging trends at the intersection of AI, software engineering, and user experience, with a particular focus on intelligent adaptive user interfaces. After introducing the main concepts, I will present a human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning framework in which human feedback contributes both to learning appropriate adaptation strategies and to refining adaptation decisions during runtime interaction. This approach aims to combine automated adaptation with user agency and control. I will also introduce a modular software environment developed to support this framework and discuss findings from initial empirical studies conducted in different interaction scenarios. Finally, I will outline directions for the next generation of adaptive user interfaces, including multimodal sensing of users and their context, richer computational user models and digital user twins, generative AI for creating interface variants and supporting adaptation decisions, explainable adaptation, and continuous learning from human interaction. Together, these developments point toward user interfaces that progressively learn, adapt, and evolve in collaboration with their users.
Biography
Emilio Insfran is Full Professor in the Department of Computer Systems and Computation at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), Spain, where he is Director of the Software Engineering and Information Systems (ISSI) Research Group. His research interests include AI for Software Engineering, Intelligent UI and software architecture, Human-AI collaboration in SE, Requirements Engineering, and Model-Driven Engineering. He has been a visiting researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute (USA), Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium), Brigham Young University (USA), and the University of Twente (The Netherlands). He has authored around 200 peer-reviewed publications and contributes to the international research community as reviewer, editorial board member, program committee chair and member, and organizer of workshops in international conferences and journals. He is also a member of the Steering Committees of the Information Systems Development (ISD) and EMERGING conferences, co-chair of the Software Engineering Working Group of CLEI, and member of IFIP TC2 on Software: Theory and Practice.