EICS 2026 Workshop · Full-Day

Engineering Cross-Compatible Personalization for Interactive AI-Driven Services

Bringing together researchers and practitioners from interactive systems engineering, HCI, AI/ML, and security/privacy to shape the future of user-sovereign, negotiable personalization.

30 June 2026
Co-located with EICS 2026

Negotiable Personalization

The workshop challenges current practice of user modelling and profiling in AI and ML-driven services, where sovereignty over user profiles resides with service providers. We focus on the concept of user-sovereign personalization, where individuals can make their digital self-representations editable, inspectable, and selectively shareable across platforms. This topic is especially timely and critical because current AI-driven services often force users into a frustrating trade-off between privacy and platform lock-in, where they must remain loyal to a specific platform to benefit from an accurate user model. Furthermore, the need to resolve this tension is sharpened by emerging regulatory requirements surrounding transparency and user oversight, such as the GDPR and the EU AI Act. To tackle these challenges, the workshop invites position papers spanning multiple computer science and interdisciplinary domains, including human-computer interaction (HCI), distributed systems, artificial intelligence and machine learning, interactive systems engineering, and security and privacy. Specific themes for these contributions encompass developing schemas and modular representations for user profiles, designing interaction techniques for inspecting or editing user models, creating negotiation workflows and consent mechanisms, engineering user-side AI architectures like federated learning, ensuring verifiability and accountability, and establishing empirical methods to measure user agency and predictability.

User-Sovereign Representations

Profiles as scoped, composable objects with explicit lifetimes, provenance, and revocation semantics — "at work", "commuting", "anonymous browsing".

Sandboxed Interaction Spaces

Private, secure data spaces with interfaces that let users inspect what the system "believes", try changes via what-if previews, and apply edits with predictable effects.

Interoperable Protocols

External services can request, negotiate, and verify only the necessary facets of a profile, enabling portability without raw-data over-collection.

Accepted Papers

The following contributions have been accepted for presentation at ECPAI 2026. Papers will be made available here after the camera-ready deadline.

Whose Persona Is It? Typed-Authority Learner Models for Dialogue-Based Language Learning

Emmanuel Ayedoun

Cross-Game Personalisation in Robot-Mediated Cognitive Training for Older Adults

Carmen Santoro and Fabio Paternò

Hardware-Enforced User Sovereignty in Edge AI

Evangelia Konstantopoulou, Andreas Komninos and Nicolas Sklavos

Toward Educational Actor Sovereignty in AI-Native Educational Data Spaces

Uwe Fischer, Mazen Salous, Jochen Meyer and Larbi Abdenebaoui

From Distorted Mirrors to Sovereign Reflections: Resisting the Grotesque Depiction of Our Digital Selves

Andreas Komninos, Gerasimos Vonitsanos and Spyros Sioutas

Invited Speakers

Eleftherios Chelioudakis

Eleftherios Chelioudakis

Homo Digitalis · University of Aegean

Lawyer and Executive Director at Homo Digitalis, PhD Candidate at the ICSD Department, School of Engineering, University of Aegean.

Keynote · 14:00–14:45 Between Legal Promise and Practical Reality: Enforcement and Interpretation Challenges in the GDPR and AI Act

EU law represents one of the most ambitious efforts to protect fundamental rights in the digital age. Yet the effectiveness of legal frameworks depends not only on the rights and obligations they establish, but also on how these rules are interpreted, implemented, and enforced in practice. At a time when regulation is increasingly portrayed as a barrier to innovation and competitiveness, this talk will explore whether the real challenge lies in persistent enforcement gaps, regulatory fragmentation, and legal uncertainty. Drawing on examples from the GDPR, the AI Act, and the recent Digital Omnibus reform packages, we will discuss the challenges of ensuring effective enforcement and interpretation of EU digital rights.

Panel · 14:45–15:30

Moderated Q&A on digital rights, AI governance, and user sovereignty.

Thomas Meier

Thomas Meier

Independent Writer · Political Philosopher

Thomas Meier is an independent writer and political philosopher of science and technology. Dr. Meier teaches and lectures on the ethics of technology at universities in Germany, the UK, and Mexico, among them LMU Munich, the University of Cambridge, and Universidad Iberoamericana.

Position Impulse · 12:15–13:00 A Different Focus on AI Ethics

Mainstream AI ethics has become a largely technocratic enterprise: a matter of bias metrics, alignment specifications, and procedural checklists administered by experts. This talk argues for a different focus. Drawing on existentialist and communitarian thought, it contends that the toughest questions raised by AI are not analytical but human—concerning meaning, freedom, responsibility, and the kinds of communities we wish to inhabit. Rather than asking only how to optimize systems, we should ask what they do to our shared forms of life. Ethics here is not a compliance layer, but a way of taking our humanity seriously.

Panel · 14:45–15:30

Moderated Q&A on digital rights, AI governance, and user sovereignty.

Theofanis Tasis

Theofanis Tasis

Ionian University

Professor of Philosophy of Information and Digital Humanities at the Ionian University. His work centres on digital humanism and the philosophy of artificial intelligence and human enhancement, at the intersection of technology, politics, and ethics.

Panel · 14:45–15:30

Moderated Q&A on digital rights, AI governance, and user sovereignty.

Workshop Schedule

A full-day workshop combining paper discussion with collaborative engineering activities.

Time Activity
10:00 – 10:30 Welcome and introductions
10:30 – 11:00 Technical presentations (1–2)
  1. Whose Persona Is It? Typed-Authority Learner Models for Dialogue-Based Language Learning — Emmanuel Ayedoun
  2. Cross-Game Personalisation in Robot-Mediated Cognitive Training for Older Adults — Carmen Santoro & Fabio Paternò
11:00 – 11:30 ☕ Coffee break
11:30 – 12:15 Technical presentations (3–5)
  1. Hardware-Enforced User Sovereignty in Edge AI — Evangelia Konstantopoulou, Andreas Komninos & Nicolas Sklavos
  2. Toward Educational Actor Sovereignty in AI-Native Educational Data Spaces — Uwe Fischer, Mazen Salous, Jochen Meyer & Larbi Abdenebaoui
  3. From Distorted Mirrors to Sovereign Reflections: Resisting the Grotesque Depiction of Our Digital Selves — Andreas Komninos, Gerasimos Vonitsanos & Spyros Sioutas
12:15 – 13:00 Position Impulse — Thomas Meier (LMU Munich)
Philosophy of technology, power, and the moral commons of AI
13:00 – 14:00 🍽️ Lunch break
14:00 – 14:45 Keynote — Eleftherios Chelioudakis (Homo Digitalis / University of Aegean)
Between Legal Promise and Practical Reality: Enforcement and Interpretation Challenges in the GDPR and AI Act
14:45 – 15:30 Panel — Q&A with Eleftherios Chelioudakis, Thomas Meier & Theofanis Tasis
Moderated discussion on digital rights, AI governance, and user sovereignty
15:30 – 16:00 ☕ Coffee break
16:00 – 17:00 Group activity
17:00 – 17:30 Group presentations and final discussion

Organizers

Florian Müller

Florian Müller

TU Darmstadt

Assistant Professor for Mobile HCI; works on mobile/XR interaction and human–AI collaboration.

Andrii Matviienko

Andrii Matviienko

KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Assistant Professor in HCI; researches interaction techniques and prototyping for XR and context-aware systems.

Alessandro Bozzon

Alessandro Bozzon

TU Delft

Professor of Human-Centered AI; expertise in user modelling, recommender systems, and scalable personalization.

Carmen Santoro

Carmen Santoro

CNR-ISTI

Researcher with expertise in end-user development and interactive system engineering.

Larbi Abdenebaoui

Larbi Abdenebaoui

OFFIS Institute for IT

Researcher at the intersection of HCI and AI, focusing on explainable AI and value-driven design.

Andrea Lavazza

Andrea Lavazza

Pegaso University

Associate Professor of Moral Philosophy and Neuroethics; researches AI ethics and neurorights.

Andreas Komninos

Andreas Komninos

University of Patras

Assistant Professor focusing on mobile and pervasive interactive systems, context-aware services and IoT.

Nicolas Sklavos

Nicolas Sklavos

University of Patras

Professor; expertise in cybersecurity, cryptography, hardware security, and embedded systems.