Research in the area of recommender systems is largely focused on helping individual users nding items they are interested in. This is usually done by learning to rank the recommendable items based on their assumed relevance for each user. The implicit underlying goal of a such system is to a ect users in di erent positive ways, e.g., by making their search and decision processes easier or by helping them discover new things. Recommender systems can, however, also have other more directly-measurable impacts, e.g., such that go beyond the individual user or the short term in uence. A recommender system on a news platform, for example, can lead to a shift in the reading patterns of the entire user base. Similarly, on e-commerce platforms, it has been shown that a recommender can induce signi cant changes in the purchase behavior of consumers, leading, for example, to generally higher sales diversity across the site. On the other hand, recommender systems usually serve certain business goals and can have an impact not only on the customers, e.g., by stimulating higher engagement on a media streaming platform or a social network, but also direct and indirect a ect sales, revenue or conversion and churn rates.
We received 21 submissions to the workshop (16 research papers and 5 position papers). Each research paper was reviewed by three members of the program committee (PC) and each position paper was reviewed by two PC members. After the reviewing process, we accepted six of the research papers. All position papers were considered relevant for the workshop. 4
The program of the half-day workshop consists of: an invited keynote by Professor Joe Konstan from the University of Minnesota, the presentation of the selected research papers, poster presentations of the position papers, an open interactive session. 5
We thank the members of the Programme Committee for their thorough reviews and their detailed feedback they gave to the authors. The PC consisted of the following set of international experts.
Gediminas Adomavicius, University of Minnesota Christine Bauer, Johannes Kepler University Linz
Pablo Castells, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid
Alexander Felfernig Graz University of Technology Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema, Politecnico di Milano Werner Geyer, IBM T.J. Watson Research
Markus Zanker, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Yong Zheng, Illinois Institute of Technology