WORKSHOP: Doctoral Symposium at RecSys 2016

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

This is funding to support participation by about 8 promising doctoral students along with about 6 senior members of the research community who will serve as mentors, in a Doctoral Symposium (workshop) to be held in conjunction with and immediately preceding the technical program at the 10th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2016), which will take place September 15-19 on the MIT and IBM Research campuses in Boston, MA. The ACM RecSys conferences are the premier international forum for the presentation of new research results, systems and techniques in the broad field of recommender systems. Recommendation is a particular form of information filtering that exploits past behaviors and user similarities to generate a list of information items that is personally tailored to an end-user's preferences. RecSys is attended annually by approximately 500 researchers and practitioners from academia and from many of the world's leading e-commerce companies, who come together to present their latest results and identify new trends and challenges in providing recommendation components in a range of innovative application contexts. In addition to the main technical track, the RecSys 2016 program will feature keynote and invited talks as well as tutorials and workshops covering the state-of-the-art in this domain. Research reports published in the Conference Proceedings are included in the ACM Digital Library, and are heavily refereed and widely cited. More information about the conference may be found online at https://recsys.acm.org/recsys16/. The goal of the RecSys Doctoral Symposium is to provide PhD students with an opportunity to present their work to a group of mentors and peers from a diverse set of academic and industrial institutions, to receive feedback on their doctoral research plan and progress, and to build a cohort of young researchers interested in similar research topics. Student participants will each be allotted 45 minutes in which to present their ongoing thesis research (about 20 minutes) and to receive feedback from the other students and the mentors (about 25 minutes). The feedback will be geared toward helping student participants understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to other RecSys research, whether their topics are adequately focused for dissertation research projects, whether their methods are correctly chosen and applied, whether their results are being appropriately analyzed and presented, etc. Discussion will be encouraged. The symposium will conclude with a group dinner to help solidify new relationships. In addition to the full day of the Symposium (on Friday September 16), during the main conference students will also present their dissertation work and plans in the form of a poster presentation to get fresh perspectives. Thus, the Doctoral Symposium will give student participants exposure to their new research community, both by presenting their own work and by observing and interacting with established professionals in the field. It will encourage students at this critical time in their careers to begin building a social support network of peers and mentors. The organizers will take steps proactively to achieve diversity among the student participants by institution, country, research topic and approach, and demographics. To this end, they will limit participation to one or two students per institution, depending on the number of applicants.