Visual Exposure Art Therapy (VEAT) is commonly delivered using static physical or flat-screen media, limiting immersion and adaptive personalization. We present IEDAT, an immersive virtual reality system that combines AI-driven artwork recommendation with therapist-guided, human-in-the-loop personalization. Therapy sessions are delivered in a virtual museum, enabling adaptive exposure while preserving professional control and transparency. In an in-situ study with 58 participants, we compared IEDAT to a state-of-the-art desktop VEAT baseline. Outcomes were evaluated using self-reported negative affect, reflection analysis, and neurophysiological measures including functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS; prefrontal regional homogeneity, ReHo) and EEG band power. While both modalities reduced negative affect, the immersive condition elicited richer recovery-oriented meaning-making in participant reflections. Supportive neurophysiological patterns further contextualized these experiential differences: VR showed increased post-session prefrontal ReHo and a directional increase in low-frequency (delta-theta) EEG power. Together, these findings demonstrate the value of immersive, human-in-the-loop personalization for strengthening engagement in digital art therapy and highlight the role of multimodal evaluation in personalized well-being systems.

Art Therapy (AT) is an established practice that facilitates emotional processing and recovery through creative expression. Recently, Visual Art Recommender Systems (VA RecSys) have emerged to support AT, demonstrating their potential by personalizing therapeutic artwork recommendations. Nonetheless, current VA RecSys rely on visual stimuli for user modeling, limiting their ability to capture the full spectrum of emotional responses during preference elicitation. Previous studies have shown that music stimuli elicit unique affective reflections, presenting an opportunity for cross-domain recommendation (CDR) to enhance personalization in AT. Since CDR has not yet been explored in this context, we propose a family of CDR methods for AT based on music-driven preference elicitation. A large-scale study with 200 users demonstrates the efficacy of music-driven preference elicitation, outperforming the classic visual-only elicitation approach. Our source code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/ArtAICare/Affect-aware-CDR

Post-intensive care syndrome (PICS) is a multifaceted condition that arises from prolonged stays in an intensive care unit (ICU). While preventing PICS among ICU patients is becoming increasingly important, interventions remain limited. Building on evidence supporting the effectiveness of art exposure in addressing the psychological aspects of PICS, we propose a novel art therapy solution through a collaborative Human-AI approach that enhances personalized therapeutic interventions using state-of-the-art Visual Art Recommendation Systems. We developed two Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) personalization methods and assessed their impact through a large-scale user study (N = 150). Our findings demonstrate that this Human-AI collaboration not only enhances the personalization and effectiveness of art therapy but also supports therapists by streamlining their workload. While our study centres on PICS intervention, the results suggest that human-AI collaborative Art therapy could potentially benefit other areas where emotional support is critical, such as cases of anxiety and depression.

Staying in the intensive care unit (ICU) is often traumatic, leading to post-intensive care syndrome (PICS), which encompasses physical, psychological, and cognitive impairments. Currently, there are limited interventions available for PICS. Studies indicate that exposure to visual art may help address the psychological aspects of PICS and be more effective if it is personalized. We develop Machine Learning-based Visual Art Recommendation Systems (VA RecSys) to enable personalized therapeutic visual art experiences for post-ICU patients. We investigate four state-of-the-art VA RecSys engines, evaluating the relevance of their recommendations for therapeutic purposes compared to expert-curated recommendations. We conduct an expert pilot test and a large-scale user study (n=150) to assess the appropriateness and effectiveness of these recommendations. Our results suggest all recommendations enhance temporal affective states. Visual and multimodal VA RecSys engines compare favourably with expert-curated recommendations, indicating their potential to support the delivery of personalized art therapy for PICS prevention and treatment.

Recommender Systems (RecSys) are essential tools in sectors like e-commerce, entertainment, and social media, providing personalized user experiences. Their impact is also growing in education, healthcare, tourism, transport, and logistics, enhancing decision-making and user engagement. Hence, designing modern RecSys requires a multi-disciplinary approach, incorporating machine learning, information retrieval, and human-computer interaction (HCI). This tutorial focuses on human-centric RecSys design, emphasizing both computational methods and user-centered principles. Participants will learn fundamental concepts, advanced algorithms, and practical implementation, with case studies linking visual arts and healthcare applications.

Artwork recommendation is challenging because it requires understanding how users interact with highly subjective content, the complexity of the concepts embedded within the artwork, and the emotional and cognitive reflections they may trigger in users. In this paper, we focus on efficiently capturing the elements (i.e., latent semantic relationships) of visual art for personalized recommendation. We propose and study recommender systems based on textual and visual feature learning techniques, as well as their combinations. We then perform a small-scale and a large-scale user-centric evaluation of the quality of the recommendations. Our results indicate that textual features compare favourably with visual ones, whereas a fusion of both captures the most suitable hidden semantic relationships for artwork recommendation. Ultimately, this paper contributes to our understanding of how to deliver content that suitably matches the user’s interests and how they are perceived.

With the advent of digital media, the availability of art content has greatly expanded, making it increasingly challenging for individuals to discover and curate works that align with their personal preferences and taste. The task of providing accurate and personalized Visual Art (VA) recommendations is thus a complex one, requiring a deep understanding of the intricate interplay of multiple modalities such as image, textual descriptions, or other metadata. In this paper, we study the nuances of modalities involved in the VA domain (image and text) and how they can be effectively harnessed to provide a truly personalized art experience to users. Particularly, we develop four fusion-based multimodal VA recommendation pipelines and conduct a large-scale user-centric evaluation. Our results indicate that early fusion (i.e, joint multimodal learning of visual and textual features) is preferred over a late fusion of ranked paintings from unimodal models (state-of-the-art baselines) but only if the latent representation space of the multimodal painting embeddings is entangled. Our findings open a new perspective for a better representation learning in the VA RecSys domain.

The evolution of smart devices has led to the transformation of many physical spaces to the so-called smart environments collectively termed as Cyber-Physical-Social System (CPSS). In CPSS users co-exist with different stakeholders influencing each other while being influenced by different environmental factors. Additionally, these environments often have their own desired goals and corresponding set of rules in place expecting people to behave in certain ways. Hence, in such settings classical approaches to personalisation which solely optimise for user satisfaction are often encumbered by competing objectives and environmental constraints which are yet to be addressed jointly. In this work we set out to (i) formalise the general problem of personalisation in CPSS from a multi-stakeholder perspective taking into account the full environmental complexity, (ii) extend the general formalisation to the case of exhibition areas and propose a personalised Multi-stakeholder aware Recommendation and Guidance method on a case study of National Gallery, London.