Workshop on Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CARS-2009) New York, NY, USA - October 25, 2009 In conjunction with the 3rd ACM Conference on Recommender Systems

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 here. 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.

Last modified: September 28, 2009