RECSYS

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 6th ACM Recommender Systems Conference (ACM RecSys 2012), held in Dublin, Ireland on September 9-13. As RecSys enters the second half of its first decade, it has clearly established itself as the premier international venue for research and development in the field of Recommender Systems, where leading researchers and practitioners from around the world meet and discuss their latest results and solutions.

The growing maturity of the conference is reflected through several changes in the program as compared to previous years: the tutorial program includes four exciting tutorials, which, for the first time, were not invited, but rather submitted and rigorously reviewed. We also put a special emphasis on soliciting demonstrations, leading to a record number of 10 demos accepted to the conference. In addition, this year continues the tradition of attractive collocated workshops, with a total of 8. Finally, 8 PhD students have been accepted to participate in the Doctoral Symposium. In parallel to growing and diversifying participation opportunities, the selectivity of the short paper track was substantially increased, while the competitive acceptance rate of the long paper track was maintained.

Overall, the number of paper submissions went up almost 10% as compared to last year, with a total of 185 submissions. Out of 119 full paper submissions, 24 were accepted (20.2%) for oral presentation at the conference. Out of 66 short paper submissions, 21 were accepted (31.8%) for poster presentation at the conference. 5 of these 21 have been identified as industry short papers, highlighting the fact that their main contribution lies in the description of a real system, typically already in wide use.

The conference program includes two keynotes, one from an academic perspective by Jure Leskovec (Stanford University) and one from an industrial perspective by Ron Kohavi (Microsoft). The Industry program also includes a rich set of talks by Ralf Herbrich (Facebook), Ronny Lempel (Yahoo! Research), Sumanth Kolar (StumbleUpon), Anmol Bhasin (LinkedIn), Thore Graepel (Microsoft Research), and Paul Lamere (The Echo Nest).