ACM SAC-RS 2013 - Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing - Recommender Systems: Theory and Applications

The ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) has been an important venue for the past twenty-seven years, attracting applied computer scientists, computer engineers, software engineers, and application developers from around the world. SAC 2013 is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP), and will be held at Coimbra, Portugal. For the first time, the ACM SAC will have a track focusing on the theory and applications of recommender systems.
The explosive growth of e-commerce environments has made the issue of information overload increasingly serious. Recommender systems aim at supporting individuals, who lack sufficient competence or resources to evaluate the potentially overwhelming number of alternatives, typically by providing a ranked list of items that are personally tailored to a user\'s preferences. In this sense, recommender systems are a particular type of information filtering systems that exploit users\' past events (such as viewing an item) in addition to actions performed by other users.
Recommender systems have proven to be a valuable means for online users to cope with the virtual information overload and have become one of the most powerful and popular tool in electronic commerce. Correspondingly, various techniques for recommendation generation have been proposed and during the last decade, many of them have also been successfully deployed in commercial environments, such as Amazon.com, Youtube.com, Netflix, Pandora, Last.fm etc.
Development of recommender systems is a multi-disciplinary effort which involves experts from various fields such as AI, Human Computer Interaction, Information Technology, Data Mining, Statistics, Adaptive User Interfaces, Decision Support Systems, Marketing, or Consumer Behavior. Theoreticians and practitioners from these fields are continually seeking techniques to make recommender systems more efficient, cost-effective and accurate.

The aims of this track are:

To publish and disseminate the most important results related to recommendation systems,
To discuss practical issues involved in designing and deploying recommendation systems including scalability, cost of implementation, and effectiveness, and,
To bring together researchers involved with real-life recommendation systems and other applied computing researchers to congregate and discuss the latest problems, results and open issues in the field and exchange.
Topics of Interest

Recommendation Algorithms
User Studies of Recommender Systems
Trust and Recommendations
Preference elicitation
Machine learning and Data Mining for Recommendation
Explanation and justification
Conversational Recommender Systems
User Behavior Modeling
Recommender Interfaces
Security and Privacy
Recommenders and communities
Context-aware Recommender Systems
Hybrid and meta recommender systems
Group Recommendations
Evaluation methodologies and metrics
Preferences Elicitation
Recommender Systems and Information Retrieval
Ontologies and semantic web technologies
Case Studies of real-world Recommender Systems
Ubiquitous Computing and Recommender Systems
Scalability
Cross-Domain Recommendation
Computational advertising
Personalization
Economic aspects and applicability
Citation Recommendation
Important Dates

Paper Submission: September 21, 2012
Tutorial Proposals: September 31, 2012
Author Notification: November 10, 2012
Camera-ready copies: November 30, 2012
Submission Guidelines

For full submission guidelines and the submission website, please follow the instructions on the SAC 2013 website carefully. Also, please note the following reminders related to paper submissions.

Authors submitting papers to the track should note that an author or a proxy attending SAC MUST present the paper. This is a requirement for the paper to be included in the ACM/IEEE digital library. No-show of scheduled papers will result in excluding the papers from the ACM/IEEE digital library.

(NEW for SAC 2013) Student Research Competition (SRC) Program: Graduate students are invited to submit research abstracts (minimum of 2-page and maximum of 4-page) following the instructions published at SAC 2013 website. Submission of the same abstract to multiple tracks is not allowed. All research abstract submissions will be reviewed by researchers and practitioners with expertise in the track focus area to which they are submitted. Authors of selected abstracts will have the opportunity to give poster presentations of their work and compete for three top-winning places. The SRC committee will evaluate and select First-, Second-, and Third- place winners. The winners will receive cash awards and SIGAPP recognition certificates during the conference banquet. Authors of selected abstracts are eligible to apply to the SIGAPP Student Travel Award program for support.
Program Committee

Track Chairs:
Prasenjit Mitra (lead), The Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A.
Lior Rokach, Ben Gurion University, Israel
Yehuda Koren, Google Research, Israel

Full Program Committee forthcoming!!!