in cooperation with SIGART, SIGIR, SIGKDD, SIGWEB and SIGECOM
Conference Program
Industry Keynote
Francisco Martin, Founder/CEO Strands, Corvallis, Oregon, USA.
Research Keynote
Michel Wedel, Pepsico Professor of Consumer Science, Marketing Department, Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, USA.
Title: Up-Close and Personalized: A Marketing View of the Future of Recommendation Algorithms
Summary: Recommendation systems have become the backbones of virtually any company with a significant online presence. In spite of the exponential growth in their development and use, several barriers prevent the effectiveness of product recommendations to reach its full potential. In particular, consumers often lack the time or ability to actively interact with these systems, and as a consequence do not provide product or service evaluations, or do not utilize the recommendations that are provided to them.
Rather than focusing on algorithmic issues such as scalability and efficiency, the Marketing literature has focused on the development of recommendation systems that are based on a fundamental understanding of consumer behavior, and the drivers and representation of consumer heterogeneity in the need for products and acceptance of recommendations. In particular recently so called Adaptive Personalization Systems (APS) have emerged in this literature. These systems work in real-time, operate on internet- and mobile platforms, require minimal proactive user effort and go substantially beyond the functionality of most standard recommendation systems.
These developments in the marketing literature are reviewed and two illustrations of APS are provided, in the context of news and music. These illustrations reveal that Adaptive Personalization Systems have the potential to significantly increase the effectiveness of personal recommendations, and perform better than extant methods.
Michel Wedel is the PepsiCo Professor of Consumer Science at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. His main research interest is in Consumer Science: the application of statistical and econometric methods to further the understanding of consumer behavior and to improve marketing decision making. He has won the Hendrik Muller lifetime award for the social and behavioral sciences awarded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences for “exceptional achievements in the area of the behavioral and social sciences,” and has been elected foreign correspondent of that Academy. He has also won the O’Dell best article award from the Journal of Marketing Research. He has written over 150 articles in peer reviewed journals that were cited more than 2000 times. He was ranked first among all scholars in economics and business in the Netherlands. He has supervised 12 PhD students, serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Classification, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and Journal of Marketing, and is area editor for Marketing Science and The Journal of Marketing Research. He has published books on Market Segmentation, Models for Marketing Decisions and Visual Marketing. He has consulted for over 25 different companies in the nonprofit and profit sectors, including companies in market research, consulting, direct marketing, food, financial services, automotive, and telecommunications.
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