This is funding to support travel for a diverse group of US PhD students and distinguished faculty mentors to participate in an international doctoral consortium on research on recommender systems that will be co-located with the 2011 ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (ACM RecSys) in Chicago, Illinois. RecSys is a leading forum that brings together faculty, students, research staff, and industry researchers who share an interest in advancing the science of recommender systems, both in terms of the underlying algorithms that predict choices based on a variety of data (e.g., ratings, social links, context) and in terms of the human elements of the process such as eliciting ratings or presenting recommendations to users. The main goal of this Doctoral Colloquium is to help train the next generation of researchers in this area.
The 2011 RecSys Doctoral Consortium will provide a group of approximately 6 PhD students studying recommender systems with an environment in which they can share and discuss their goals, methods and results at an early stage of their research. It will take place on October 23, 2011, the first day of the conference. By participating in the doctoral consortium, students will gain feedback on their work from other students and six prominent faculty members, allowing them to enhance their own research proposal. Students will also develop a better understanding of the different research communities engaged in the study of recommender systems, and learn how to position their own work within this community. In addition, the consortium will provide students with opportunities to make new professional connections beyond their own disciplines.
Students will be recruited for the doctoral consortium through advertisement on the conference website, postings to relevant mailing lists and direct solicitation to faculty working in the area of information science and related fields. Particular attention will be placed on identifying participants from under-represented groups. To apply for the consortium, students will submit an extended abstract outlining their research goals and work to date, a curriculum vita, a paragraph describing what they expect to get from participating in the doctoral consortium, and a letter of reference from their primary advisor. Applications will be rated by the consortium chairs in terms of originality, importance of research topic, intellectual and methodological rigor, stage of work, and advisor recommendation. Priority will be given to students who have formulated their dissertation topic but are early enough in the process that they can still benefit from feedback.
Broader impacts: The RecSys doctoral consortia traditionally bring together the best of the next generation of researchers in recommender systems and related areas, allowing them to create a social network both among themselves and with senior researchers at a critical stage in their professional development. Participation is encouraged from a broad range of relevant disciplines and approaches, thereby broadening attendees' perspectives on their topics of study and promoting advancement of the field. The organizers will try explicitly to identify and include the broadest possible group of highly qualified participants. As a consequence of these steps, the student and faculty participants will constitute a diverse group across a variety of dimensions, which will help broaden the students' horizons to the future benefit of the field and to U.S. e-commerce, which relies heavily on recommender systems.
A one day doctoral symposium was held in Chicago on October 23, 2011 as part of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys). Six students and four faculty members participated in the doctoral symposium. The faculty members reviewed the papers submitted by the students and provided detailed feedback as a part of the reviewing process and also at the symposium itself when each student made an oral presentation and received extensive constructive feedback from the faculty. This feedback was targeted towards helping the students in their dissertation work and in particular helped the students to learn how to scope and plan their thesis research. It was especially useful to the students because it constituted cross-fertilization of various ideas among the four attending faculty members with different disciplinary backgrounds. In addition, the students presented posters as part of the poster session at the main conference. Finally, the four page extended abstracts of student presentations appeared in the proceedings of the RecSys conference and are also available in the ACM digital library. As a result of attending this symposium, the students gained valuable experience, especially those who were new to the RecSys community. The feedback from the students at the end of the symposium was extremely positive.
