Conducting Recommender Systems User Studies Using POPROX
and . 2025. Conducting Recommender Systems User Studies Using POPROX. Tutorial to be presented at Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP 2025), Jun 16–19, 2025.
Abstract
The Platform for OPen Recommendation and Online eXperimentation (POPROX) is a new resource to allow recommender systems and personalization researchers to conduct online user research without having to develop all of the necessary infrastructure and recruit users themselves. Our first domain is personalized news recommendations: POPROX 1.0 provides a daily newsletter (with content from the Associated Press) to users who have already consented to participate in research, along with interfaces and protocols to support researchers in conducting studies that assign subsets of users to various experimental algorithms and/or interfaces.
The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce the platform and its capabilities to researchers in the UMAP community who may be interested using the system. Participants will walk through the implementation of a sample experiment to demonstrate the mechanics of designing and running user studies with POPROX.