Call for Papers
ACM SIGIR 99 Workshop on Recommender Systems: Algorithms and Evaluation

Organizers:

Ian Soboroff, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Charles Nicholas, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Michael J. Pazzani, University of California, Irvine.

Background and Theme

The world of recommender systems has undergone quite an expansion
since the Communications of the ACM published their feature issue on
the topic two years ago.  Projects such as GroupLens have gone on to
be successful commercial ventures, and recommendation systems are de
rigeur for Internet commerce.  The basic technology has very quickly
gone from the research world to popular applications.  However, many
problems remain to be solved.

Several methods for recommender systems have emerged, including
approaches that base recommendations on correlations of groups of
users and methods that learn about individual users. However, the
architectural issues of cold-start, sparse ratings, and scalability
continue to dominate the field.

The state of the art in recommender systems will be enhanced by the
development of evaluation methodologies for recommender systems.  User
studies are difficult to conduct and generalize from, and issues of
presentation and relevance make traditional IR evaluation measures not
entirely suited to the domain.  Furthermore, test collections such as
DEC SRC's EachMovie data set are becoming standard tools, but the need
for larger collections in different domains is great.

Thus, the theme of the workshop is moving to the next phase of
recommender systems research, from the basic "how do we do it"
to "how can we do it better", and "how do we know that it's better".

Goal

The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers and
practitioners involved in developing, testing, and fielding
recommender systems.  The workshop will provide a forum for discussing
current practice and recent research results, and develop a roadmap
for future recommender systems research.


Participants and Selecton Process

Workshop participants are invited to submit position papers that
describe recent or ongoing work in this area.  Accepted papers will be
published in the workshop proceedings to be distributed at the
workshop and preserved on the Web.  The organizing committee will
select papers to be presented at the workshop on the basis technical
merit, interest, or significant innovation.

Those interested in presenting a paper, please send a paper, up to 12
pages by June 9th to the address below. Please follow the author
instructions for SIGIR 99 papers (except for the length limitation),
found at
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/conferences/sigir99/author-info.html.
Electronic submissions (Postscript or MS Word format) are
preferred. Please include author affiliations. Those interested in
attending should send a one paragraph statement of their research
interest to the same address.

Ian Soboroff
ECS 233F
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250 USA
ian@cs.umbc.edu


For news and workshop updates, please visit the workshop web page at
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/~ian/sigir99-rec/