We are pleased to invite you to contribute to the Twelfth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2018), the premier venue for research and applications of recommendation technologies. The upcoming RecSys conference will be held in Vancouver, Canada, from October, 2nd to October 7th, 2018. The conference will continue RecSys’ practice of connecting the research and practitioner communities to exchange ideas, frame problems, and share solutions. All accepted papers will be published by ACM.
We construe recommender systems broadly, including applications ranging from e-commerce to social networking, and a wide variety of technologies ranging from collaborative filtering to knowledge-based reasoning or deep learning. We welcome new research on recommendation technologies coming from very diverse communities ranging from psychology to mathematics. In particular, we care as much about the underlying algorithms and systems as we care about the human and economic impact of these systems.
Topics of interest for RecSys 2018 include (but are not limited to):
Conversational recommender systems
Novel machine learning approaches to recommendation algorithms
Evaluation metrics and studies
Explanations and evidence
Algorithm scalability, performance, and implementations
Innovative/New applications
Voice, VR, and other novel interaction paradigms
Case studies of real-world implementations
Preference elicitation
Privacy and Security
Economic models and consequences of recommender systems
Personalisation
Social recommenders
User modelling
Authors will be asked to assign a selection of predefined custom tags to describe their paper in the submission system. Tags can be assigned to indicate algorithms, interfaces, automated or user-centric evaluations, for example. Reviewers will also report their expertise over these tags, and the information will be used in review assignments.
Paper Submission Categories
LONG PAPERS should report on substantial contributions of lasting value. The maximum length is 8 pages (plus up to 1 page references). Each accepted long paper will be included in the conference proceedings and presented in a plenary session as part of the main conference program. Each accepted long paper will also be allocated a presentation slot in a poster session to encourage discussion and follow up between authors and attendees.
We expect the review process to be highly selective: the acceptance rates for full papers in the past three years was slightly over 20%.
SHORT PAPERS typically discuss exciting new work that is not yet mature enough for a long paper. In particular, novel but significant proposals will be considered for acceptance to this category despite not having gone through sufficient experimental validation or lacking strong theoretical foundation. Applications of recommender systems to novel areas are especially welcome. The maximum length is 4 pages (plus up to 1 page references). Each accepted short paper will be included in the conference proceedings and presented in a poster session. The poster presentation may include a system demonstration. Selected short papers will be invited as oral presentations. Note that rejected long paper submissions will not be considered as short papers.
SIGCHI Submitter Agreement
RecSys 2018 is a SIGCHI conference and making a submission to a SIGCHI conference is a serious matter. Submissions require time and effort by SIGCHI volunteers to organise and manage the reviewing process, and, if the submission is accepted, the publication and presentation process. Thus, anyone who submits to RecSys 2018 implicitly confirms the following statements:
I confirm that this submission is the work of myself and my co-authors.
I confirm that I or my co-authors hold copyright to the content, and have obtained appropriate permissions for any portions of the content that are copyrighted by others.
I confirm that any research reported in this submission involving human subjects has gone through the appropriate approval process at my institution.
I confirm that if this paper is accepted, I or one of my co-authors will attend the conference. Papers that are not presented at the conference by an author may be removed from the proceedings at the discretion of the program chairs.
Paper Format and Submission
All submissions and reviews will be handled electronically. RecSys 2018 submissions should be prepared according to the standard double-column ACM SIG proceedings format. Additional information about formatting and style files is available online. Papers must be submitted to PCS2 by 23:59, AoE (Anywhere on Earth) on May 7th, 2018. There will be no extensions to the submission deadline.
The peer review process is double-blind (i.e. anonymised). This means that all submissions must not include information identifying the authors or their organisation. Specifically, do not include the authors’ names and affiliations, anonymise citations to your previous work and avoid providing any other information that would allow to identify the authors, such as acknowledgments and funding.
Submitted work should be original. Simultaneous submissions to other conferences or journals is explicitly prohibited by ACM policies. However, technical reports or ArXiv disclosure prior to or simultaneous with RecSys submission, is allowed, provided they are not peer-reviewed. Please refer to the ACM Publication License Agreement for further details.
Please take note that the official publication date is the date the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of the conference. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.
Important Dates
Abstract submission deadline: April 30th, 2018
Paper submission deadline: May 7th, 2018
Author notification: July 9th, 2018
Camera-ready version deadline: August 6th, 2018
Deadlines refer to 23:59 (11:59pm) in the AoE (Anywhere on Earth) time zone.
John O’Donovan, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Call for Tutorial Proposals
RecSys 2018 is pleased to invite proposals for tutorials to be given in conjunction with the conference. The goal of the tutorials is to provide conference attendees, including early-career researchers and researchers crossing-over from related disciplines, with an opportunity to learn about recommender system concepts and techniques. Tutorials also serve as a venue to share presenters’ expertise with the global community of recommender system researchers and practitioners. Tutorials focus on specific topics including, but not limited to:
Introductions to recommender systems or to specific techniques (e.g., deep learning, feature engineering, tensorflow),
Evaluation of recommender systems (e.g., system-centric and user-centric evaluation, experimentation),
Designing user experiences and interactions (e.g., virtual assistants),
Ethical and legal aspects of recommender systems (e.g., privacy, fairness, accountability, transparency, and control of bias),
Recommender systems facing real-world challenges (e.g., large-scale recommender systems or stream-based recommendation),
Building and deploying recommender systems in specific domains (e.g., music, tourism, education, TV/video, jobs, enterprise, health, and/or fashion),
Recommender systems supporting decision making,
Recommendation for groups, tasks, or situations, including intent-aware recommender systems,
Eliciting and learning user preferences,
Recommender systems that take users’ emotional state, physical state, personality, trust, level-of-expertise, and/or cognitive readiness into account,
Sensors and recommender systems (including mobile recommender systems and wearables),
Intersections of recommender systems with other domains (e.g., information retrieval, machine learning, human computer interaction, or databases).
This year we are experimenting with tutorials of variable length. You can choose to propose a regular tutorial of around 90 minutes, or suggest a half-day or full-day course. The length of your proposed tutorial should be commensurate with the presented materials and the projected interest of the RecSys community in the tutorial topic. We may work with accepted tutorial presenters to adjust the length of the tutorial.
We actively encourage both researchers and industry practitioners to submit tutorial proposals that target different levels of expertise and different interests. We also encourage the submission of hands-on tutorials, for instance through the use of notebooks that combine theoretical concepts with practical exercises.
You can get an idea for the interest of the RecSys community in different topics in the following survey carried out in RecSys 2017. You can still vote for the topics you would like to see this year.
What topics would you like to see in RecSys Tutorials 2018? (26 responses; ~60% research; 40% industry)
Proposal Format and Submission
The tutorial proposal should be a PDF document no more than 2 pages long, submitted by e-mail to and organized as follows:
Tutorial title.
Tutorial length (tutorials are mostly 90 minutes, but we will consider half-day or full-day tutorials).
Motivation for proposing this tutorial (why is it important for RecSys).
Name, email address, and affiliation of tutorial instructor(s). Each listed presenter must present in person at the conference.
Detailed bulleted outline of the tutorial (this point should take the most space).
Targeted audience (introductory, intermediate, advanced) and prerequisite knowledge or skills.
Importance of the topic for the RecSys community.
Teaching experiences and history of prior tutorials by the presenter(s).
List of relevant publications by the presenter(s).
The following elements are not mandatory for the proposal, but encouraged:
A short explanation of relationship of the tutorial proposal to “trends” at past RecSys conferences.
A 2-minute video where the presenters introduce themselves and pitch their tutorial.
Statement that the materials (slides, readings, and/or code) used/mentioned in the tutorial will be publicly available after the tutorial.
Notebooks (e.g. iPython or Jupyter) that will be used during the course, if any.
Evaluation Criteria
Tutorial proposals will be reviewed according to: ability of the tutorial to contribute to strengthening the foundations of recommender system research, or to broadening the field to look at important new challenges and techniques, experience and skill of the presenter(s), and the value of any materials released with the tutorial for the community.
Important Dates
Tutorial proposal submission deadline: May 28th, 2018
Tutorial proposal notification: June 16th, 2018
Camera-ready tutorial summary deadline: August 6th, 2018
Deadlines refer to 23:59 (11:59pm) in the AoE (Anywhere on Earth) time zone.
RecSys 2018 is pleased to invite proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with the conference. The goal of the workshops is to provide additional venues for discussing novel ideas as well as recent results of research in progress.
In 2018 our goal is to have a balanced workshop program which comprises workshop formats of different types and a combination of newly emerging, currently evolving, and historically understudied topics. Different full-day and half-day workshop formats are possible, for example:
Workshops with novel interactive workshop formats and a relatively small number of participants. Such workshop formats might for example target at the exploration of a certain topic during the workshop through a moderated discussion or breakout sessions, resulting in a draft paper or report to be completed and published after the workshop. Particular priority will be given to these formats which require the active involvement of the participants.
Workshops with the traditional workshop format on specialized topics; such workshops typically have their own paper submission and review processes. Proposals for continuations of existing workshop series are welcome, however, please include a brief statement on the necessity for the new edition, including a description of the outcomes of previous years and the expected novelty of this edition.
In both cases, a subset of workshop papers selected by workshop chairs will also be allocated a presentation slot in a poster session to encourage discussion and follow up between authors and attendees.
We encourage you to contact us by email to in advance with workshop ideas; we will work with prospective workshop organizers to help them design successful proposals. In particular for workshop proposals with novel interactive formats we are happy to assist you in further developing and implementing your ideas. Please contact us at least three weeks before the deadline.
We encourage both researchers and industry practitioners to submit proposals.
Proposal Format and Submission
The workshop proposal should be a PDF document no more than 4 pages long, submitted by e-mail to and organized as follows:
Workshop title
A short description of the workshop including the rationale for the workshop and how and why it fits the audience of RecSys. This description should include also the topic, format, and details about what type of submission is requested from prospective attendees. Please also add an explanation on how the workshop complements, rather than duplicates, the topics of the main conference.
Name, email address, and affiliation for workshop organizer(s) and a brief description of their experience in organizing such events.
Requested duration (half day or full day), and expected number of participants.
Description of workshop activities. Outline how the workshop will be organized and how the time will be spent. In particular, please sketch how you will engage participants to foster more interactivity and engagement during the workshop.
For more interactive workshop formats, also outline the process of selecting or inviting the participants.
Description of plans for promoting the workshop and disseminating the results.
History of prior workshops on this topic (e.g., including the number of submissions and attendees), if any.
Evaluation Criteria
Ability of the topic to contribute to the continued development of the field of recommender systems.
Level of complementarity of the topic to the main conference.
Clear plan for attracting submissions, making the workshop itself productive, and disseminating results.
Evidence that this plan will be successful.
Experience of the organizers.
Important Dates
Workshop proposal submission deadline: March 5th, 2018
Workshop proposal notification: March 26th, 2018
Camera-ready workshop summary deadline: August 6th, 2018
Workshop dates: October 6th and 7th, 2018
Example deadlines (workshop organizers are free to apply their own deadlines, although we encourage the organizers to follow the suggested deadlines):
Call for Papers publication: April 9th, 2018
Paper submission deadline: July 16th, 2018
Reviewer deadline: August 3rd, 2018
Author notification: August 13th, 2018
Camera-ready version deadline: August 27th, 2018
Deadlines refer to 23:59 (11:59pm) in the AoE (Anywhere on Earth) time zone.
Martha Larson, Radboud University and TU Delft, The Netherlands
Call for Doctoral Symposium Submissions
The ACM Recommender Systems 2018 Doctoral Symposium provides an opportunity for doctoral students to explore and develop their research interests under the guidance of a panel of distinguished researchers from both academia and industry. We invite students who feel they would benefit from this kind of feedback on their work to apply for this unique opportunity to share their work with students in a similar situation as well as senior researchers in the field. The strongest candidates will be those have made some progress, but who are not so far along their research that they can no longer make changes. Typically this means that they have defined their topic and have completed some research, but still have at least a year of research remaining before completing a dissertation (in many universities this corresponds to the dissertation proposal stage). The feedback from attendees in previous years has been very positive and the Doctoral Symposium has been considered very useful in providing research guidance.
The symposium has the following objectives:
Provide a supportive setting for feedback on students’ current research and guidance on future research directions.
Offer each student comments and fresh perspectives on their work from faculty and students outside their own institution.
Promote the development of a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research.
Contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and conference events.
Student participants will have their extended abstracts (4 pages excluding references) published in the conference proceedings. They will also have the opportunity to present a poster of their work.
Symposium Format and Participation Expectations
Participants are expected to attend the entire symposium, including the dinner, and are also expected to attend the ACM RecSys 2018 conference. Accepted participants will receive travel support for the RecSys 2018 conference directly from the ACM.
The format of the symposium will be primarily student presentations supplemented by one or two panel sessions to provide advice and Q&A opportunities with senior researchers in the field. Student presentations will be structured to provide maximum feedback. In particular:
Presentations will be limited to 20 minutes, followed by 20-25 minutes for feedback and discussion;
Two of the symposium faculty will be assigned to provide “primary” feedback for each presenter; following this primary feedback there will be a period of open feedback from all participants;
Students will be expected to take notes for another participant so that each of you can focus on interacting during the discussion surrounding your presentation;
During the main conference, you will also present your dissertation work and plans in the form of a poster presentation.
Being accepted into the symposium is an honor, and involves a commitment to giving and receiving thoughtful commentary with an eye towards shaping the field and upcoming participants in the research area.
Application Format and Submission
Applications are invited from graduate students pursuing a PhD project who would benefit from detailed workshop discussions of their doctoral research by a panel of established researchers.
Applications should include the following:
An extended abstract (see below).
A curriculum vitae.
A one-paragraph statement of expected benefits of participation, including questions regarding your dissertation that you would like to ask your symposium mentors.
Submit these three items in a single PDF file to . Your contribution should be named lastname_ds.pdf, where lastname is your family name. The file must be no larger than 5 Mbytes.
A brief letter of recommendation from your doctoral advisor or mentor focused on how your participation in the doctoral symposium will benefit your dissertation research.
Your doctoral advisor should send this letter directly to us at .
Extended Abstract
Prepare a four-page (excluding references) extended abstract of your thesis work in the two-column ACM SIG Proceedings Format. The extended abstract will be evaluated with regard to:
Originality of the work with respect to current concepts and techniques (provide relevant citations).
Importance of the work with respect to fundamental issues in recommender systems (clearly identify the problems you are trying to solve).
Rigor and validity of claims, argumentation, methodology, results, and interpretations.
Clarity and persuasiveness of expression.
Please write your extended abstract to the same quality standards as a regular RecSys submission. The accepted extended abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings and available in the ACM Digital library, where they will remain accessible to thousands of researchers and practitioners worldwide.
Confidentiality
Confidentiality of submissions is maintained during the review process. All rejected submissions will be kept confidential in perpetuity. All submitted materials for accepted submissions will be kept confidential until two weeks prior to the start of the conference. Submissions should contain no information or materials that are proprietary at publication time.
Selection Criteria
To provide maximum feedback to each student, participation in the doctoral symposium is limited to no more than 8 doctoral students. Selection is based on two broad criteria:
Value of the symposium to the student:
The degree to which the applicant is positioned to benefit from participation, including the student’s position in the doctoral process (the greatest benefit is for students with a developed research idea but much of the work yet undone).
The degree to which the student may otherwise lack access to a diverse set of feedback and input on his or her research plans (e.g., availability of local experts and advisors).
Value of the student’s participation to other students.
The quality of the extended abstract (as identified above), both as a model of excellent research and as an indication of the student’s potential in the field.
Diversity of participation, including diversity by institution, country, research topic and approach, and demographics. In general we will limit participation to one or two students per institution, depending on the number of applicants.
Evidence that the student will be an effective and active participant, providing feedback to others and helping to build a research network.
Application Checklist
Well in advance of the deadline:
Create your submission materials:
Write an extended abstract according to the ACM SIG Proceedings Format. The abstract must print to no more than 4 pages (excluding references).
Write a curriculum vitae.
Write a one-paragraph statement of expected benefits of participation.
Package all materials into a single PDF file. Name it according to the following convention: lastname_ds.pdf. Submit it to .
Test that your PDF prints correctly and that is it no larger than 5 Mbytes.
Confirm that your advisor has sent a letter of recommendation.
Important Dates
Doctoral symposium submission deadline: June 1st, 2018
Doctoral symposium submission notification: July 8th, 2018
Camera-ready abstract deadline: August 26th, 2018
Deadlines refer to 23:59 (11:59pm) in the AoE (Anywhere on Earth) time zone.
Bracha Shapira, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
Call for Demos
Allowing the user to see and use a demo of a research project makes them excited about it – it makes the work real and tangible. Demos are one of the most effective ways to show other people why the ideas matter. Beyond just advertising and exposure, demos make other people inspired by the work.
We invite demonstrations of developments in all aspects of recommender systems, for example:
Interaction techniques (preference elicitation interfaces, recommendation presentation, explanations, and more)
Tools for development and analysis of recommender systems (design tools, evaluation systems, analytics tools)
Innovative applications of recommender systems
Recommender user experiments
Demos should be described in PDF format, in English, formatted according to the ACM Proceedings template for US Letter size, viewable on any platform. Submit the description to EasyChair.
The description of the demo must include the following:
A link to a narrated screen capture of your system in action (ideally a video).
An overview of the algorithm or system that is the core of the demo, including citations to any publications that support the work.
A discussion of the purpose and the novelty of the demo.
A description of the required setup. If the system will feature an installable component (e.g., mobile app) or website for users to use throughout or after the conference, please mention this.
Demos must not be under review in any other conference at the time of submission and must contain novel contributions. All submissions will be double-blind peer reviewed. This means that submissions must not include information identifying the authors or their organization. Specifically, do not include the authors’ names and affiliations, and anonymize self-citations, acknowledgments, and funding sources. At least one of the authors of each accepted demo is required to attend the conference.
Important Dates
Demo submission deadline: July 2nd, 2018
Demo notification: July 16th, 2018
Camera-ready demo summary deadline: August 6th, 2018
Deadlines refer to 23:59 (11:59pm) in the AoE (Anywhere on Earth) time zone.
We are pleased to invite you to participate in the Twelfth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2018), the premier venue for research and applications of recommendation technologies. ACM RecSys 2018 will be held in Vancouver, Canada, from October 2nd to October 7th, 2018. The conference will continue RecSys’ practice of connecting the research and practitioner communities to exchange ideas, discuss problems, and share solutions.
Industry practitioners are invited to submit talk proposals to the RecSys conference industry track. This track seeks presentations about challenges and practical solutions to significant real-world issues faced by industry practitioners. We encourage submissions that describe substantial challenges that were overlooked by the research community and your promising new approaches that could foster discussion and collaboration. We also recognize that diverse speaker backgrounds and topics facilitate richer discussions at the conference, therefore we especially encourage women and under-represented colleagues to submit talk proposals.
Examples of talk topics include, but are not limited to:
Challenges faced by practitioners that are under-studied in the research community and practical solutions
Novel techniques that solve significant issues in practice
Case studies of real-world implementations
Evaluation metrics and studies
Field and user studies
Lessons learned from real world deployments
Novel recommender system applications
Note that although industry talks are solicited separately, we expect to create a combined single track program from both accepted papers and industry talks in RecSys 2018. Furthermore, selected proposals should be accompanied by a poster for the conference.
Proposal Format and Submission
We are accepting proposals for Industry talks under 20min (exact length TBD). Proposals must include the following:
Title and abstract of the proposal presentation (1 page)
Short CV of the presenter(s) (up to 300 words)
Talk proposals should be emailed to .
Important Dates
Proposals must be submitted before the submission deadline of May 7th, 2018 to receive full consideration.
Submitters will be notified of talk acceptance or rejection by July 9th, 2018.
