Context and Recommendations: Challenges and Results
                                                                 [Abstract]
                                                              Francesco Ricci
                                                    Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
                                                      Faculty of Computer Science
                                                               fricci@unibz.it


ABSTRACT                                                                  About the Author
Recommender Systems (RSs) are popular tools that auto-                    Francesco Ricci is associate professor of computer science
matically compute suggestions for items that are predicted                at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. His current re-
to be interesting and useful to a user. They track users’                 search interests include recommender systems, intelligent in-
actions, which signal users’ preferences, and aggregate them              terfaces, mobile systems, machine learning, case-based rea-
into predictive models of the users’ interests. In addition               soning, and the applications of ICT to tourism and eHealth.
to the long-term interests, which are normally acquired and               He has published more than one hundred of academic pa-
modeled in RSs, the specific ephemeral needs of the users,                pers on these topics and has been invited to give talks in
their decision biases, the context of the search, and the con-            many international conferences, universities and companies.
text of items’ usage, do influence the user’s response to and             He is among the editors of the Handbook of Recommender
evaluation for the suggested items. But appropriately mod-                Systems (Springer 2011), a reference text for researchers and
eling the user in the situational context and reasoning upon              practitioners working in this area. He is the editor in chief
that is still challenging; there are still major technical and            of the Journal of Information Technology & Tourism and in
practical difficulties to solve: obtaining sufficient and infor-          the editorial board of the Journal of User Modeling and User
mative data describing user preferences in context; under-                Adapted Interaction. He is member of the steering commit-
standing the impact of the contextual dimensions on user                  tee of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. He
decision-making process; embedding the contextual dimen-                  served on the program committees of several conferences,
sions in a recommendation computational model. These top-                 including as a program co-chair of the ACM Conference on
ics will be illustrated in the talk, making examples taken                Recommender Systems (RecSys), the International Confer-
from the recommender systems that we have developed.                      ence on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR) and the Interna-
                                                                          tional Conference on Information and Communication Tech-
                                                                          nologies in Tourism (ENTER).




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for private and academic purposes.
In: G. Specht, H. Gamper, F. Klan (eds.): Proceedings of the 26th GI-
Workshop on Foundations of Databases (Grundlagen von Datenbanken),
21.10.2014 - 24.10.2014, Bozen, Italy, published at http://ceur-ws.org.