Eight graduate students will be supported to participate actively in the Graduate Symposium at the 2014 Recommender Systems conference of the Association for Computing Machinery in Silicon Valley, RecSys-2014. This doctoral symposium is structured to provide a non-threatening environment for students, in particular for those who may be attending a major international meeting for the first time. To do so, the organizers will depart from the usual conference structure and give students exposure to their research community by presenting their own work and receiving feedback from peers and experienced researcher, by two invited talks about career and life in academia versus industry, and by observing and interacting with other professionals in the field during the conference.
Students selected for funding will receive registration, shared hotel accommodation, and need-based airfare support to attend the conference. A carefully-developed evaluation system has been set up to allocate the funds most effectively. Among the priorities are supporting students from different institutions, students who have prepared the most substantial papers to present, students from under-represented groups, and students with financial need. In this area, students require multidisciplinary training. The conference plans a strong program of papers by scientists from both academia and industry researchers around the world, internationally known invited speakers, and a variety of demos and other academia and industry activities.
The ACM RecSys conference and the Doctoral Symposium will advance the state of art in recommender systems by proving an open and friendly environment for both junior and senior researchers to explore creative, original, or potentially transformative concepts in the area. Recommender systems exploit past user behaviors and user similarities to generate information items that are personally tailored to an end-user's preferences. They have quickly become among the most useful tools available for accessing information available on the document web, social web sites, ecommerce systems, mobile systems, entertainment systems and more. In the future, they are likely to revolutionize other domains such as education and health care. As RecSys brings together the main international research groups working on recommender systems, along with many of the world?s leading companies, it has become the most important annual conference for the presentation and discussion of recommender system research, and thus a crucial step in a student's career.
