WORKSHOP ON CONTEXT-AWARE RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS (CARS-2009)
New York, NY, USA, October 25, 2009
http://ids.csom.umn.edu/faculty/gedas/cars2009/
(In conjunction with the 3rd ACM Conference on Recommender Systems)



CALL FOR PAPERS

The importance of contextual information has been recognized by researchers
and practitioners in many disciplines, including e-commerce personalization,
information retrieval, ubiquitous and mobile computing, data mining, marketing,
and management. While a substantial amount of research has already been
performed in the area of recommender systems, the vast majority of existing
approaches focuses on recommending the most relevant items to users and does
not take into account any additional contextual information, such as time,
location, weather, or the company of other people. Therefore, this workshop
aims to bring together researchers with wide-ranging backgrounds to identify
important research questions, to exchange ideas from different research
disciplines, and, more generally, to facilitate discussion and innovation in
the area of context-aware recommender systems (CARS). In particular, topics
of interest for this workshop include (but are not limited to):

-- Context modeling techniques for recommender systems;
-- Context-aware user modeling for recommender systems;
-- Data sets for context-dependent recommendations;
-- Algorithms for detecting the relevance of contextual data;
-- Algorithms for incorporating contextual information into recommendation
process;
-- Algorithms for building explicit dependencies between contextual features
and ratings;
-- Interacting with context-aware recommender systems;
-- Novel applications for context-aware recommender systems;
-- Large-scale context-aware recommender systems;
-- Evaluation of context-aware recommender systems.

In case the main topic of the paper is a challenging dataset for context-aware
recommender systems, the author(s) should describe the data model and the main
features of this dataset, and make the dataset available for the research
community.

Paper submission. The length of submissions is 5 pages in the standard ACM
SIG proceedings format. Microsoft Word and LaTeX templates for papers in ACM
SIG format are provided at:
http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates
All submissions must be in English and the files should be in PDF format.
Paper submissions and reviews will be handled electronically; each paper will
be evaluated by the workshop program committee based on originality,
significance, technical soundness, and clarity. All papers must be submitted
through the CARS-2009 page on the EasyChair conference management site at:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cars2009

Accepted papers. The accepted papers will be made available on the workshop
website, and their authors will present their work in front of the workshop
audience. The workshop will NOT request the copyright transfer from the
authors; therefore, after receiving feedback at the workshop, the authors will
be able to submit the improved versions of their papers to conferences and
journals (the workshop organizers are currently exploring the possibilities to
organize a special issue on this topic in some research journal).

Note about workshop participation. According to RecSys-2009 procedures, only
accepted workshop participants can register to attend the workshops. Those,
who do not have a paper at the CARS-2009 workshop but would still like to
attend it, are encouraged to email a statement of interest (no more than 1
page) to the workshop chairs by August 10. The requests to participate will
be honored based on the space available.

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for paper submission: July 20, 2009
Notification of acceptance: August 10, 2009
Final versions due: September 15, 2009

WORKSHOP CHAIRS

Gediminas Adomavicius, University of Minnesota, USA
Francesco Ricci, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Xavier Amatrian, Telefonica Research, Spain
Hideki Asoh, Intelligent Systems Research Institute, Japan
Linas Baltrunas, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Shlomo Berkovsky, CSIRO, Australia
Michele Gorgoglione, Politecnico of Bari, Italy
Dominikus Heckmann, DFKI, Saarbr?cken, Germany
Cosimo Palmisano, Fiat, Italy
Kurt Partridge, Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, USA
Barry Smyth, UCD, Dublin, Ireland

(Additional members to be added...)