This award supports a doctoral symposium at the 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2010) to be held in Barcelona, Spain, September 26-30, 2010. RecSys is the leading international forum for the presentation and discussion of research and practice on recommender systems. The doctoral symposium will help students refine their dissertation projects so that they can make stronger contributions to the solution of critical intellectual challenges in recommender systems.
Nearly all of the leading E-Commerce sites world-wide use recommender systems, to help their customers find the products and services they will most value from the millions of alternatives available. Creating effective recommender systems is a difficult challenge. The proposed doctoral symposium will help in training a generation of scientists who will become leaders in developing this important field of research, and in applying the research results in practical applications. One particular strength of the RecSys conference, from its inception to the present day, is the rich participation of industry leaders in the conference. Through a poster session, the broader community, including the substantial contingent of industry participants in the conference, will also gain exposure to this new cohort of students. By helping doctoral students to appreciate each other's different perspectives and form a cohort across those boundaries, we can help to preserve the diversity of the field in the coming years.
This project was a small grant funded to support Ph.D. students to come to a meeting where they could receive advice on their research from senior Professors at other universities. The goal of the meeting is to help Ph.D. students who are only getting advice from one or two people at their universities (their advisors) to have a broader understanding of how to shape their research to have the maximum impact on the world. The meeting was a big success. The students were very pleased to receive the feedback, even though some of it was quite critical, since it helped them to steer their research in more useful directions before they wasted a lot of time on problems that the experts could tell would not be as interesting or valuable. The students who were from universities that have a smaller group in recommender systems research were particularly pleased, because they benefited even more from the interaction with outside experts. The structure of the meeting was that a student would present a detailed plan for the next year or two of her research, and then the faculty would ask questions about the plan, and point out places where shifts in emphasis or the use of alternative methods might lead to better results.
