DiveRS 2011 - International ACM RecSys Workshop on Novelty and Diversity in Recommender Systems - DiveRS 2011

International ACM RecSys Workshop on

Novelty and Diversity in Recommender Systems - DiveRS 2011

Chicago, IL, USA, 23 or 27 October 2011

http://ir.ii.uam.es/divers2011


Scope


Most research and development efforts in the Recommender Systems field
have been focused on accuracy in predicting and matching user
interests. However there is a growing realization that there is more
than accuracy to the practical effectiveness and added-value of
recommendation. In particular, novelty and diversity have been
identified as key dimensions of recommendation utility in real
scenarios, and a fundamental research direction to keep making
progress in the field. Novelty is indeed essential to recommendation:
in many, if not most scenarios, the whole point of recommendation is
inherently linked to a notion of discovery, as recommendation makes
most sense when it exposes the user to a relevant experience that she
would not have found, or thought of by herself ?obvious, however
accurate recommendations are generally of little use. Not only does a
varied recommendation provide in itself for a richer user experience.
Given the inherent uncertainty in user interest prediction ?since it
is based on implicit, incomplete evidence of interests, where the
latter are moreover subject to change?, avoiding a too narrow array of
choice is generally a good approach to enhance the chances that the
user is pleased by at least some recommended item. Sales diversity may
enhance businesses as well, leveraging revenues from market niches. It
is easy to increase novelty and diversity by giving up accuracy; the
challenge is to enhance these aspects while still achieving a fair
match of the user's interests. The goal is thus generally to enhance
the balance in this trade-off, rather than just a diversity or novelty
increase.

DiveRS 2011 aims to gather researchers and practitioners interested in
the role of novelty and diversity in recommender systems. The workshop
seeks to advance towards a better understanding of what novelty and
diversity are, how they can improve the effectiveness of
recommendation methods and the utility of their outputs. We aim to
identify open problems, relevant research directions, and
opportunities for innovation in the recommendation business. The
workshop seeks to stir further interest for these topics in the
community, and stimulate the research and progress in this area.

The workshop welcomes the participation of researchers, students, and
practitioners in the Recommender Systems community and related areas
such as Information Retrieval, Data Mining, Machine Learning, and
Human-Computer Interaction, working in different application domains,
working on or interested in the workshop topics.

Topics


We invite the submission of papers reporting original research,
studies, advances, experiences, or work in progress in the scope of
novelty and diversity in Recommender Systems. The topics the workshop
seeks to address include ?though need not be limited to? the
following:

* Modeling novelty and diversity in recommender systems.

- Theoretical foundation for novelty and diversity.

- Recommendation novelty and diversity models.

- Popularity, risk, surprisal, serendipity, freshness, discovery.

- Link to diversity models in Information Retrieval.
* Novelty and diversity enhancement.

- Diversification methods.

- Recommendation of long-tail and difficult items, cold-start problem.

- Individual vs. global diversity.

- Machine Learning for novelty and diversity.
* Novelty and diversity across recommendations.

- Novelty and diversity in sequential recommendation.

- Novelty and diversity in interactive recommendation.

- Aggregate diversity.

- Novelty and diversity in time and context.

- Novelty and trust.
* Novelty and diversity evaluation.

- Experimental methodologies and design.

- Novelty and diversity metrics.

- Datasets.

- User studies.
* Business perspective on novelty and diversity.

Submission


Two submission types are accepted: technical papers of up to 8 pages,
and short position papers up to 4 pages. Each paper will be evaluated
by at least two reviewers from the Programme Committee. The papers
will be evaluated for their originality, contribution significance,
soundness, clarity, and overall quality. Within a required quality
standard, position papers will be appreciated for presenting new
perspectives and insights, and their potential for provoking thought
and stimulating discussion.

All submissions shall adhere to the standard ACM SIG proceedings
format: http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-t....
The accepted papers will be published in a specific volume for the
workshop in the ACM Proceedings series.

Submissions shall be sent as a pdf file through the online submission
system is now open at:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=divers2....

Important dates:

Paper submission deadline: 25 July 2011.
Author notification: 19 August 2011.
Camera ready version due: 12 September 2011.
Workshop: 23 or 27 October 2011.

Programme Committee


Xavier Amatriain, Telefónica R&D, Spain
Leif Azzopardi, University of Glasgow, UK
Iván Cantador, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Licia Capra, University College London, UK
Oscar Celma, BMAT, Spain
Charles Clarke, University of Waterloo, Canada
Sreenivas Gollapudi, Microsoft Research, USA
Neil Hurley, University College Dublin, Ireland
Oren Kurland, Technion, Israel
Neal Lathia, University College London, UK
Hao Ma, Microsoft Research, USA
Qiaozhu Mei, University of Michigan, USA
Jérôme Picault, Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent, France
Filip Radlinski, Microsoft Research, Canada
Davood Rafiei, University of Alberta, Canada
Francesco Ricci, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
David Vallet, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Paulo Villegas, Telefónica R&D, Spain
ChengXiang Zhai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Tao Zhou, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, China
Jianhan Zhu, True Knowledge, UK

Organizers


Pablo Castells, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Jun Wang, University College London, UK
Dell Zhang, Birkbeck, University of London, UK
Rubén Lara, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, Spain

Contact email: divers2011.workshop-AT-gmail.com

More info at: http://ir.ii.uam.es/divers2011
.