Recommender Systems 2007
120 or so folks who are keen on figuring out how to make recommendations
have descended onto the campus of the University of Minnesota for the
two day RecSys'07 conference. It
is a good mix of attendees, 47 participants from have come from outside
of the U.S.. 50 of the participants are from industry. There are 16
long papers (out of 35 submitted) and 14 short papers (out of 23
submitted).
The keynote, given by Krishna Bharat, was an excellent presentation on
Google News, placing it into the wider context of news and
journalism. Greg Linden has an excellent description of the talk.
The first paper session on Privacy and Trust had me thinking quite a bit more about how people can get good recommendations without revealing too much about themselves.
The afternoon panel session included members of industry who opined about what issues were important to the commercial world. Themes emerged about search vs. discovery vs. recommendation (just some semantic problems), APIs, portability of attention data, cross content recommendation, and the difficulty of evaluation.
I particularly enjoyed the poster session - I like being able to talk to folks about their research, and a poster session is the best way to do it.
Day 2 of the conference
is about to begin - and I am the session chair for the first session, so
I now need to read through a few papers so I can avoid a repeat of my worst conference moment.