Paper Session 7: Past, Present & Future

Date: Sunday, Sept 18, 2016, 11:20-12:20
Location: Kresge Auditorium
Chair: Jill Freyne

• PPFRecommender Systems with Personality
  by Amos Azaria, Jason Hong

  We believe that in the future, the most common form of recommender systems will be present in a personal assistant. We claim that such an intelligent agent must be personal, i.e., know its user’s preferences and recommend relevant content, a dynamic learner, instructable, supportive and affable. We describe the current state of the art and the challenges which should be addressed in each of these agent properties and provide examples of how we expect future personal agents to convey these properties.

  Full text in ACM Digital Library

• PPFPast, Present, and Future of Recommender Systems: An Industry Perspective
  by Xavier Amatriain, Justin Basilico

  When the Netflix Prize launched in 2006, it put a spotlight on the importance and use of recommender systems in real-world applications. The competition provided many lessons, and many more have been learned since the Grand Prize was awarded in 2009. The use of recommender systems in industry has continued to grow driven by the availability of many kinds of user data and the continued interest for the area within the research community. In this paper, we will describe what we see as the past, present, and future of recommender systems from an industry perspective.

  Full text in ACM Digital Library

• PPFAlgorithms Aside: Recommendation As The Lens Of Life
  by Tamas Motajcsek, Jean-Yves Le Moine, Martha Larson, Daniel Kohlsdorf, Andreas Lommatzsch, Domonkos Tikk, Omar Alonso, Paolo Cremonesi, Andrew Demetriou, Kristaps Dobrajs, Franca Garzotto, Ayse Göker, Frank Hopfgartner, Davide Malagoli, Thuy Ngoc Nguyen, Jasminko Novak, Francesco Ricci, Mario Scriminaci, Marko Tkalcic, Anna Zacchi

  In this position paper, we take the experimental approach of putting algorithms aside, and reflect on what recommenders would be for people if they were not tied to technology. By looking at some of the shortcomings that current recommenders have fallen into and discussing their limitations from a human point of view, we ask the question: if freed from all limitations, what should, and what could, RecSys be? We then turn to the idea that life itself is the best recommender system, and that people themselves are the query. By looking at how life brings people in contact with options that suit their needs or match their preferences, we hope to shed further light on what current RecSys could be doing better. Finally, we look at the forms that RecSys could take in the future. By formulating our vision beyond the reach of usual considerations and current limitations, including business models, algorithms, data sets, and evaluation methodologies, we attempt to arrive at fresh conclusions that may inspire the next steps taken by the community of researchers working on RecSys.

  Full text in ACM Digital Library

• PPFBehaviorism is Not Enough
  by Michael D Ekstrand, Martijn C Willemsen

  Behaviorism is the currently-dominant paradigm for building and evaluating recommender systems. Both the operation and the evaluation of recommender system applications are most often driven by analyzing the behavior of users. In this paper, we argue that listening to what users say — about the items and recom-mendations they like, the control they wish to exert on the output, and the ways in which they perceive the system — and not just observing what they do will enable important developments in the future of recommender systems. We provide both philosophi-cal and pragmatic motivations for this idea, describe the various points in the recommendation and evaluation processes where explicit user input may be considered, and discuss benefits that may result from considered incorporation of user preferences at each of these points. In particular, we envision recommender applications that aim to support users’ better selves: helping them live the life that they desire to lead. For example, recommender-assisted behavior change requires algorithms to predict not what users choose or do now, inferable from behavioral data, but what they should choose or do in the future to become healthier, fitter, more sustainable, or culturally aware. We hope that our work will spur useful discussion and many new ideas for recommenders that empower their users.

  Full text in ACM Digital Library

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