The “Women in RecSys” tradition started in 2014 to foster diversity among the RecSys community. This year we offer three different ways to come together 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 first time we award up to six “Women in RecSys Journal Paper of the Year Awards.” See below for more details on the submission criteria. This award will come with a free RecSys registration and the opportunity to present the respective journal paper at the main conference.
Our “Women in RecSys Keynote Series” starts already on August 24 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 20, for any women attending RecSys physically in Seattle. 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.
Given the current circumstances, we will also organize a virtual “Women in RecSys Meetup” get-together for all women of the RecSys community one week after its physical counterpart on September 28.
This year’s events are co-hosted by Julia Neidhardt (TU Wien, Austria), Özlem Özgöbek (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway), and Hanna Hauptmann (Utrecht University, Netherlands). Details on the individual events will be provided shortly.
Women in RecSys Journal Paper of the Year Awards
This award will be given at the RecSys 2022 conference to women-authored journal papers which have distinguished themselves due to their innovativeness and scientific rigor. 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.
Depending upon the number of the nominated papers, the committee may select up to six winning journal papers, up to three from junior and up to three from senior researchers. The winning papers will each receive one free registration to RecSys 2022 to be able to present their work during the conference and be acknowledged on the RecSys 2022 websites.
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 (physical or virtual) the RecSys 2022 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 January 01, 2020, and December 31, 2021 (online pre-publication is acceptable). Each person can nominate only one paper. Self-nominations are allowed.
Submission details: A complete citation for the paper in APA style together with a pdf file of the article should be submitted by July 30, 2022, to: https://new.precisionconference.com/sigchi.
Nominations Submission Deadline: July 30, 2022
Notifications Deadline: August 15, 2022
Women in RecSys Keynote Series
Who: Everyone is welcome
What: Talks about RecSys challenges and career paths
When: Wednesdays 5-6 PM CEST (August 24, August 31, September 07, September 14)
Where: Zoom. To participate in the Women in RecSys Keynote Series, please write a short email to , and we will send you the link.
Women in RecSys Breakfast
PHYSICAL BREAKFAST
Who: Women attending RecSys physically
What: Networking while enjoying a nice breakfast
When: September 20
Room and time will follow later
VIRTUAL Meetup
Who: All RecSys women
What: Networking on a virtual platform
When: September 2u, 5-7 PM CEST
Same Zoom link as for the Keynote Series. To participate, please write a short email to , and we will send you the link.
Who: Everyone is welcome
What: Talks about RecSys challenges and career paths
When: Wednesdays 5-6 PM CEST (August 24, August 31, September 07, September 14)
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 24th: Katrien Verbert: Explaining recommendations: design implications and lessons learned
Katrien Verbert is Associate Professor at the Augment research group of KU Leuven. She obtained a doctoral degree in Computer Science in 2008 at KU Leuven, Belgium. She was a postdoctoral researcher of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at KU Leuven. She was an Assistant Professor at TU Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2013 –2014) and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium (2014 – 2015). Her research interests include visualisation techniques, recommender systems, explainable AI, and visual analytics. She has been involved in several European and Flemish projects on these topics, including the EU ROLE, STELLAR, STELA, ABLE, LALA, PERSFO, Smart Tags and BigDataGrapes projects. She is also involved in the organisation of several conferences and workshops (general co-chair IUI 2021, program chair LAK 2020, general chair EC-TEL 2017, program chair EC-TEL 2016, workshop chair EDM 2015, program chair LAK 2013 and program co-chair of the EdRecSys, VISLA and XLA workshop series, DC chair IUI 2017, DC chair LAK 2019).
Aug 31st: Mounia Lalmas: Personalization at Spotify: Machine Learning at Scale
Mounia is a Director of Research at Spotify, and the Head of Tech Research in Personalisation, where she leads an interdisciplinary team of research scientists, working on personalization and discovery. Mounia also holds an honorary professorship at University College London. In January 2022, she took an additional appointment as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Before that, she was a Director of Research at Yahoo, where she led a team of researchers working on advertising quality. She also worked with various teams at Yahoo on topics related to user engagement in the context of news, search, and user-generated content. Prior to this, she held a Microsoft Research/RAEng Research Chair at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. Before that, she was Professor of Information Retrieval at the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London.
Sept 7th: Elizabeth Daly: Interactive AI and beyond accuracy
Elizabeth Daly is a Senior Technical Staff Member and research manager leading the Interactive AI team in IBM Research – Dublin. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin in November 2007 with her thesis entitled “Social Network Analysis for Routing in Disconnected Delay-Tolerant MANETs”. Before joining IBM Research – Dublin she was a post-doctoral researcher in the IBM Research Centre for Social Software in Cambridge, MA. There her work focused on the intersection of social networks and information systems. More recently her work focuses on innovative solutions for interactive AI where systems influence users and users influence systems. Her work has received two RecSys Best Short Paper awards and IBM’s Corporate Technical Award. She is on the program committee of conferences such as RecSys, IUI, WWW, UMAP and ICWSM. Elizabeth has served as Program Chair, Workshop Chair and Demo Chair for RecSys and organised workshops at IUI, ICWSM, CSCW and AAAI. Previously, Elizabeth was Vice Chair of the Royal Irish Academy committee on Engineering and Computer Science and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin.
Sept 14th: Li Chen: Building User Trust in Recommender Systems: Progress and Challenges
Dr. Li Chen is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). She obtained her PhD degree in Computer Science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, and Bachelor and Master degrees from Peking University, China. Her recent research focus has mainly been on human-centered AI with the main emphasis on recommender systems and complex decision support systems. The applications cover multiple domains including social media, e-commerce, online education, and public health. She has authored and co-authored over 100 publications, with over 7,300 citations so far (H-index 43). Her co-authored papers have received several awards, such as the CHI’22 Honorable Mention Award, UMAP’20 Best Student Paper Award, UMUAI 2018 Best Paper Award, and UMAP’15 Best Student Paper Award. She is included in the list of the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists by Stanford University. She is now an ACM senior member, co-editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS), steering committee member of ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys), editorial board member of User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction Journal (UMUAI), editorial board member of Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (JIIS), and associate editor of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS). She also served as program co-chair of ACM RecSys’20 and ACM UMAP’18.
