Web Personalization can be defined as any set of actions that can tailor the Web experience to a particular user or set of users. The experience can be something as casual as browsing a Web site or as (economically) significant as trading stocks or purchasing a car. The actions can range from simply making the presentation more pleasing to anticipating the needs of a user and providing customized and relevant information. To achieve effective personalization, organizations must rely on all available data, including the usage and click-stream data (reflecting user behaviour), the site content, the site structure, domain knowledge, as well as user demographics and profiles. Efficient and intelligent techniques are needed to mine this data for actionable knowledge, and to effectively use the discovered knowledge to enhance the users' Web experience. These techniques must address important challenges emanating from the size of the data, the fact that they are heterogeneous and very personal in nature, as well as the dynamic nature of user interactions with the Web. These challenges include the scalability of the personalization solutions, data integration, and successful integration of techniques from machine learning, information retrieval and filtering, databases, agent architectures, knowledge representation, data mining, text mining, statistics, information security and privacy, user modelling and human-computer interaction.

Recommender systems represent one special and prominent class of such personalized Web applications, which particularly focus on the user-dependent filtering and selection of relevant information and – in an e-Commerce context - aim to support online users in the decision-making and buying process. Recommender Systems have been a subject of extensive research in AI over the last decade, but with today's increasing number of e-commerce environments on the Web, the demand for new approaches to intelligent product recommendation is higher than ever. There are more online users, more online channels, more vendors, more products and, most importantly, increasingly complex products and services. These recent developments in the area of recommender systems generated new demands, in particular with respect to interactivity, adaptivity, and user preference elicitation. These challenges, however, are also in the focus of general Web Personalization research.

In the face of this increasing overlap of the two research areas, the aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners of both fields, to foster an exchange of information and ideas, and to facilitate a discussion of current and emerging topics related to "Web Intelligence". This workshop represents the seventh in a successful series of ITWP workshops that have been held at IJCAI and AAAI since 2001 and would be – after the successful events at AAAI'07 and AAAI'08 - the 3rd workshop on ITWP and Recommender Systems.

Workshop Topics
Original contributions are solicited in the following areas:

User Modeling

* The use of domain knowledge and ontologies in user modeling
* User context modeling and algorithms for contextual and task-oriented recommender systems
* Individual and Group user models / Group recommendation
* Cross-Domain Models
* Privacy and Trust / Robust and trust-aware recommender systems.
* Automated Techniques for user profile generation and updating
* Cognitive and sociological models for Web navigation, e-commerce interactions, and recommendation
* Self-adaptation

Preference Elicitation

* Catering to user privacy preferences
* Knowledge acquisition strategies
* The role of domain knowledge in preference elicitation
* Utility function elicitation from Implicit and Explicit user interaction
* Data models for Web usage, content, and structure data
* Integration of content, structure and usage data for preference discovery
* Techniques for improving online data quality
* Latent factor mining
* Natural language interaction and explanations

Architectures and Systems

* Personalized Search
* Scalability of personalization and recommendation techniques
* Agents for intelligent browsing and navigation
* Adaptive hypertext systems
* Privacy-preserving personalization methods
* Architectures for personalized privacy
* Hybrid Recommendation System
* Conversational Recommendation Systems

Enabling Technologies

* Data/Web mining for personalization
* Link Analysis and Graph Mining
* Automated techniques for ontology generation, learning, and acquisition
* Machine Leaning techniques for information extraction and integration
* Learning metadata and Harvesting
* Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web
* Ubiquitous Environments

Evaluation Methodologies, Metrics, and Case Studies

* User Studies
* Empirical Evaluation of systems and metrics
* Practical applications and case studies

Paper Submission & Publication

The format for submissions is the same as that of IJCAI-09. Please check the IJCAI-09 website for the style files. (http://ijcai-09.org/fcfp.html) Papers should be no longer than 12 pages inclusive of all references and figures. All papers must be submitted in PDF. All papers must be original, and must not have not been published or submitted elsewhere. At least one author for each accepted paper is expected to attend the workshop. Non-archival working notes will be produced containing the papers presented at the workshop.

Selected papers from the workshop may be considered for expansion and inclusion in a special issue of a journal. The workshop is open to all those interested in attending.

All submissions must be sent electronically to S.S.Anand@warwick.ac.uk.

Important Dates

* March 6, 2009: Deadline for electronic submission
* April 17, 2009: Author Notification
* May 8, 2009: Submission of camera-ready paper
* July 11-13, 2009: IJCAI-09 Workshop Program

Workshop Organizers

Sarabjot Singh Anand
Department of Computer Science
University of Warwick, UK
S.S.Anand@warwick.ac.uk

Bamshad Mobasher
School of Computer Science, Telecommunication, and Information Systems
DePaul University, Chicago, USA
mobasher@cs.depaul.edu

Alfred Kobsa
School of Information and Computer Sciences
University of California, Irvine, USA
kobsa@uci.edu

Dietmar Jannach
Department of Computer Science
Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany
dietmar.jannach@udo.edu