The “Women in RecSys” tradition started in 2014 to foster diversity in the RecSys community. This year we offer three different ways to come together both as the whole RecSys community to celebrate female RecSys role models and in the form of both physical and virtual networking meetings for women of the community.
This year will be the second time we award up to six “Women in RecSys Journal Paper of the Year Awards”. See the respective tab for more details on the submission criteria. This award will come with a free RecSys registration and the opportunity to provide the respective journal paper at the main conference.
Our “Women in RecSys Keynote Series” starts already on August 23rd and gives insights into the career paths and the current RecSys challenges of our speakers. We invite everyone to join and enjoy both talks and discussions.
The traditional “Women in RecSys Breakfast” will take place on Tuesday, September 21st, for any women attending RecSys physically in Singapore. The event provides an opportunity for women to share the challenges and successes of working within our community and to exchange experiences with one another.
This year’s events are co-hosted by Julia Neidhardt (TU Wien, Austria), Özlem Özgöbek (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway), Hanna Hauptmann (Utrecht University, Netherlands), and Ashmi Banerjee (TU Munich, Germany). Details on the individual events are provided in the following tabs.
Journal Paper of the Year Awards
This award will be given at the RecSys 2023 conference to women-authored journal papers which have distinguished themselves due to their innovativeness and scientific rigour. This award is made possible due to a generous donation to the Women in RecSys efforts by Nvidia – the winner of the RecSys Challenge 2021.
An invited committee consisting of prominent researchers representing different areas of expertise will be established to judge the merits of nominated papers and make recommendations to the Women in RecSys committee.
The winner(s) must attend the RecSys 2023 conference.
Qualification/nomination details: To qualify, the first or last author should be a researcher who is a woman. The nominated journal paper needs to have a RecSys focus and must have been published between 1 June 2021 and 31 May 2023 (online pre-publication is acceptable). Each person can nominate only one paper. Self-nominations are allowed. If a paper qualifies for both the junior and the senior track, it should be nominated twice.
Submission details: The paper details, together with a pdf file of the article, should be submitted by 30 July 2023 to EasyChair.
Nominations Submission Deadline: 30 July 2023 Notifications Deadline: 15 August 2023
Keynote Series
Who: Everyone is welcome
What: Talks about RecSys challenges and career paths
When: Wednesdays 5-6 PM CEST (August 23, August 30, September 06, September 13)
Where: Zoom. To participate in the Women in RecSys Keynote Series, please write a short email to , and we will send you the link.
Aug 23: Judith Masthoff — Human factors in recommender systems
Judith Masthoff is a Professor in Human-Centered Computing at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and Editor in Chief of the User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction journal. Previously, she worked in industry (Philips Electronics Research), the University of Brighton (England), and the University of Aberdeen (Scotland). Facebook uses her patent for personalized advertising. She works on recommendations beyond individual items to individual users, such as group-, sequence- and package-recommendation. She also works on explanations in recommender systems, and the layered design and evaluation of adaptive systems. Beyond recommenders, she works on topics such as personalized digital behaviour change interventions and emotional support by computers.
Aug 30: Christine Bauer — Keep an eye on the big picture – in recommender systems research and as a scientist
Christine Bauer is EXDIGIT Professor of Interactive Intelligent Systems at the Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Interfaces (AIHI) at the Paris Lodron University Salzburg, Austria. Her research centers on interactive intelligent systems. In recent years, she worked on context-aware recommender systems in the music and media domains. The core interests in her research activities are fairness and multi-method evaluations. Her interdisciplinary background drives her research activities. She holds a Doctoral degree in Social and Economic Sciences, a Master’s degree in Business Informatics, and a Diploma in International Business Administration. In addition, she pursued studies in jazz saxophone. She has authored more than 100 papers and holds several best paper awards and many awards for her reviewing activities. She is on the Editorial Board of ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS) and co-organizes the Workshop series “Perspectives on the Evaluation of Recommender Systems (PERSPECTIVES).”
Sep 6: Sole Pera — The value of a supportive academic community: my view of RecSys & research serving society
Sole Pera is an Associate Professor at the Web Information Systems group of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science, at TU Delft. Sole’s research focuses on Information Retrieval, with an emphasis on enhancing information access for typically underserved user groups, e.g., children or individuals who use English as a second language. Sole remains the co-PI in the ongoing NSF-funded project CAST (Child Adaptive Search Tool). She is part of an international and interdisciplinary group of researchers interested in advancing research on information retrieval systems that can support education. Prior to joining TU Delft, Sole (a native of Argentina) completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Brigham Young University in 2014. She joined the Computer Science Department at Boise State University as an Assistant Professor in 2014, where she was promoted to Associated Professor with Tenure in 2019. While at Boise State, she was the co-director of the People and Information Research Team alongside Dr. Michael Extrand.
She has published more than 100 peer-reviewed research papers in top-tier conferences and journals in information retrieval, recommender systems, and child-computer interaction. Beyond her academic contributions, she is part of the (senior) program committee for conferences in her field of expertise, including ACM RecSys, ACM SIGIR, and ACM UMAP, is a member of RecSys’ Steering Committee and was General Chair for RecSys ’18 & Program Chair for UMAP ’23. Sole is a strong supporter of underrepresented minorities in CS. As such, she has volunteered for numerous outreach endeavours encouraging young girls to explore CS, has co-organized Women in RecSys events, and has served as diversity and inclusion co-chair for ACM RecSys, ACM UMAP, ACM HT, among others.
Sep 13: Tao Ye — Finding your next favorite “song” — the music recommender system analogy for career growth
Dr. Tao Ye is a Sr. Applied Science Manager at Amazon. She leads a team of scientists and engineers at Amazon Music to work on combining recommender systems, dialog management and spoken language understanding into real world music conversations. Prior to Amazon, she was a founding member of the Pandora science team and Director of science, spending 9+ years on personalized recommendation systems, search and voice, measurements, and user modeling. In the larger research community, she has served on the steering committee of Recsys since 2018, and has served as industry co-chair for 2018 Recsys, 2022 SIGIR and 2022 CIKM. She co-founded then co-chaired the Large Scale Recommender System workshop for 5 years (2013-2017), co-chaired OARS workshop at KDD (2021-2023), and co-chaired MuRS at Recsys (2023). She has more than two decades of experience in the software industry, holding research scientist and lead engineer positions in social media, networking and mobile systems. She holds 14 granted patents and has published 12 peer reviewed papers.
She received her PhD from University of Melbourne in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, her MS from UC Berkeley in EECS and dual BS degrees from Stony Brook University in CS and Engineering Chemistry.
Breakfast
This event is currently sold out. We are working on whether more attendees can be arranged.
Who: Women attending RecSys physically
What: Networking while enjoying a nice breakfast
When: September 21, 8:30-9:30 AM, Singapore local time (GMT+8)
