Overview
The “Women in RecSys” tradition started in 2014 to foster diversity in the RecSys community. This year, we offer three ways for the community to come together and celebrate female role models in RecSys through physical and virtual networking events.
In addition to the well-established “Women in RecSys Breakfast“, which provides an opportunity for those attending in person and identify as female to share the challenges and successes of working within our community and to exchange experiences with one another, we also plan to host a “Women in RecSys Keynote Series“. From 18 September to 9 October 2024, this series will feature virtual weekly meetings where speakers will share insights into their career paths and discuss current challenges in RecSys.
To further highlight the research contributions of women in the RecSys community, we will award up to five “Women in RecSys Journal Paper of the Year Awards“. This award will come with a free RecSys registration and the opportunity to present the respective journal paper at the main conference.
This year’s events are co-hosted by Ashmi Banerjee (Technical University of Munich, Germany), Karlijn Dinnissen (Utrecht University, Netherlands), Özlem Özgöbek (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway), and Sole Pera (TU Delft, Netherlands). More details about each event can be found in the corresponding tabs.
Journal Paper of the Year Awards
This award will be given at the RecSys 2024 conference to women-authored journal papers that have distinguished themselves due to their innovativeness and scientific rigor.
The committee may select up to five winning journal papers depending on the number of nominated papers. The winning papers will each receive one free registration to RecSys 2024 to be able to present their work during the conference and be acknowledged on the RecSys 2024 website.
We will have two submission categories: junior and senior. Individuals who have graduated with a Ph.D. within the past five years or are currently pursuing their Ph.D. will qualify as juniors, while those with more than five years of experience will be categorized as seniors.
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 2024 conference.
Qualification/nomination details
To qualify, the first or last author should be a woman researcher. The nominated journal paper must have a RecSys focus and must have been published between 31 May 2023 and 31 May 2024 (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 and a PDF file of the article should be submitted by 31 May 2024 at 11:59 PM AoE (Anywhere on Earth) to EasyChair (Women in RecSys track).
Nominations Submission Deadline: 31 May 2024 (11:59 PM AoE)
Notifications Deadline: 15 July 2024
Keynote Series
- Who: Everyone is welcome
- What: Talks about RecSys challenges and career paths
- When: Wednesdays 5–6 p.m. CEST (18 September, 25 September, 2 October, 9 October, 2024)
- Where: Zoom. To participate in the Women in RecSys Keynote Series, provide your contact information (via this Google Form), and we will send you the link.
Stay tuned for the abstracts!
Sep 18: Caroline Therwath-Chavier — AI²: why Artificial Intelligence should be All Inclusive
Caroline Therwath-Chavier is an international expert in tech recruitment and diversity based in Paris. Ever since she graduated with a Master’s from Sciences Po (the Paris Institute of Political Science), she has spent over a decade recruiting world-class software engineers and experts in Machine Learning. Since the creation of The Allyance in 2020, Caroline has worked with companies such as Believe, Doctolib, Kering and Google.
Caroline has always been passionate about encouraging under-represented groups to network, speak at conferences and present their work to their peers. Highly involved in promoting diversity in engineering teams, Caroline met Chloé-Agathe Azencott during the ICLR Conference 2017. Together, they decided to create the Paris meetup chapter of Women in Machine Learning and Data Science (WiMLDS) the same year. It is now the 3rd largest meetup, with 4 900 members, in this global organization that has over 90 000 members worldwide.
In 2019, Caroline was the Inclusion & Diversity co-chairwoman for the RecSys conference in Copenhagen.
With The Allyance, the company she founded in 2020, Caroline helps companies hire the best talent, set up the perfect diversity policies and optimize recruitment processes. Intersectionality, passion and kindness are more than buzzwords for her: they are her “raison d’être”!
Sep 25: Sherry Sahebi — Recommender Systems Beyond Commerce: Personalized Learning
Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at SUNY Albany and founder of the Personalized AI (PersAI) Lab.
Sherry Sahebi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at SUNY-Albany, where she directs the Personalized AI (PersAI) Lab. Her research lies at the intersection of machine learning and human-centered applications, with a particular focus on developing personalized models for educational systems, recommendation systems, and healthcare applications. Her work addresses challenges such as non-homogeneous temporality, missing data, and implicit sequential feedback through models like point processes, multi-view tensor factorizations, and deep sequential models.
Sherry’s research has been supported by fundings from the National Science Foundation, including prestigious CAREER and CRII awards. Her research has been featured in venues such as The International Educational Data Mining (EDM), ACM Web conference, ACM Recommender Systems (RecSys), The AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED). She has a strong commitment to advancing the research community, having served on the organizing committees for conferences like ACM RecSys, EDM, and UMAP.
Oct 2: Julia Neidhardt — Transforming Recommender Systems: Balancing Personalization, Fairness, and Human Values
Julia Neidhardt is a researcher at the Research Unit Data Science at TU Wien Informatics with a background in mathematics and computer science. She has been a guest researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University and the University of Geneva. Her research focuses on user modeling and recommender systems several domains including tourism and news, as well as digital humanism. She is a senior program committee member of the ACM Conference on Recommender Systems and an associate editor of the Journal of Information Technology & Tourism. Julia is also the leader of the Christian Doppler Lab for Recommender Systems and UNESCO Co-Chair on Digital Humanism.
Oct 9: Ding Tong — Towards A Healthy Recommendation Ecosystem
Ding is a Senior Research Scientist at Netflix, where she leads the research and development of machine learning algorithms in multiple areas to enhance the Netflix homepage recommender systems. Her expertise spans recommendation algorithms, bandits & RL, user modeling, and system optimization, with a focus on creating scalable, personalized experiences for millions of users. Prior to Netflix, Ding was a Senior Applied Scientist at Uber, where she tech-led the real-time Uber Eats Promotion Personalization Service.
Ding serves as the Sponsorship Co-Chair for RecSys 2024 and has been an active PC member for RecSys and WWW. She is also a dedicated mentor and strong supporter of multiple women in tech initiatives, continuously working to foster diversity and inclusion in the tech community.
Breakfast
This event is currently sold out.
- Who: Women attending RecSys physically
- What: Networking while enjoying a nice breakfast
- When: October 17, 8:00-9:00 AM
- Where: Circolo Unione, Via Alberto Sordi 7, Bari (same building of Petruzzelli Theater)
