GroupRS 2013 - International Workshop on Group Recommender Systems: Concepts, Technology, Evaluation (GroupRS)

This workshop at UMAP 2013 aims at bringing together participants from academia and industry with diverse backgrounds and a broad interest in designing, developing, and evaluating group recommender systems.
Group recommender systems support groups of users in decision-making by providing shared suggestions. They generate recommendations from a broad range of alternatives that suit group members' tastes or needs. Previous work in the field of recommender systems has shown great contributions (e.g., systems providing shared music recommendations for public places, systems providing shared movie recommendations for groups). Research in the field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work has a long tradition of group decision support.
Recommender systems research for a long time focused mainly on recommending to individual users, over the last decade, there has been a substantial increase in research into group recommenders. The wide-spread research into group recommender systems and algorithms has led to an increased discussion on the importance of the decision making process as well as the relevancy and influence of the respective domain on the users' needs and behaviour. While group discussion and decision making has for some decades been supported in specific CSCW and groupware applications, it is now increasingly done via social media such as Facebook and Yammer. Furthermore, mobile devices such as smart phones are spreading rapidly. This availability and experience with communication and cooperation support are triggering a need for novel concepts for flexible support of group recommendations and decisions in various domains.
Topics
This workshop aims at cross-fertilising group recommender systems and CSCW in order to tackle interesting open research questions. These include, but are not limited to:
Modelling users (in particular aspects relevant for group decision making such as personality), groups, and the decision making process
Handling evolving group members' needs and interests
Supporting convergence and divergence for plurality
Designing group recommenders that allow for user interaction (e.g., balancing and mediating conversation and negotiation, allowing critiquing)
User-centred design and evaluation of group recommender systems (e.g., measuring the long-term effect of group decisions on users' satisfaction)
Explaining group recommendations
Privacy and security issues associated with group recommenders