Overview

This workshop at UMAP 2013 aims at bringing together participants from academia and industry with diverse backgrounds and a broad interest in designing, developing, and evaluating group recommender systems.

Group recommender systems support groups of users in decision-making by providing shared suggestions. They generate recommendations from a broad range of alternatives that suit group members' tastes or needs. Previous work in the field of recommender systems has shown great contributions (e.g., systems providing shared music recommendations for public places, systems providing shared movie recommendations for groups). Research in the field of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work has a long tradition of group decision support.

Recommender systems research for a long time focused mainly on recommending to individual users, over the last decade, there has been a substantial increase in research into group recommenders. The wide-spread research into group recommender systems and algorithms has led to an increased discussion on the importance of the decision making process as well as the relevancy and influence of the respective domain on the users' needs and behaviour. While group discussion and decision making has for some decades been supported in specific CSCW and groupware applications, it is now increasingly done via social media such as Facebook and Yammer. Furthermore, mobile devices such as smart phones are spreading rapidly. This availability and experience with communication and cooperation support are triggering a need for novel concepts for flexible support of group recommendations and decisions in various domains.

Topics

This workshop aims at cross-fertilising group recommender systems and CSCW in order to tackle interesting open research questions. These include, but are not limited to:

• Modelling users (in particular aspects relevant for group decision making such as personality), groups, and the decision making process
• Handling evolving group members' needs and interests
• Supporting convergence and divergence for plurality
• Designing group recommenders that allow for user interaction (e.g., balancing and mediating conversation and negotiation, allowing critiquing)
• User-centred design and evaluation of group recommender systems (e.g., measuring the long-term effect of group decisions on users' satisfaction)
• Explaining group recommendations
• Privacy and security issues associated with group recommenders

Participation and Submission

We invite long (max. 6 pages) and short (max. 3 pages) papers. Papers must follow the Spinger LNCS formatting guidelines. Please submit your paper through the EasyChair conference system by 8 April 2013 (23:59 PST). Accepted papers will be published in the CEUS-WS volume of the UMAP 2013 conference.

Co-Chairs

Tom Gross (Primary contact person)
Human-Computer Interaction Group, University of Bamberg, Germany

Judith Masthoff
Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK

Christoph Beckmann
Human-Computer Interaction Group, University of Bamberg, Germany

Program Committee

Liliana Ardissono, University of Torino, Italy
Linas Baltrunas, Telefonica Research, Spain
Christoph Beckmann, University of Bamberg, Germany
Shlomo Berkovsky, CSIRO, Australia
Tom Gross, University of Bamberg, Germany
Anthony Jameson, DFKI, Germany
Judith Masthoff, University of Aberdeen, UK
Francesco Ricci, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Barry Smyth, University College Dublin, Ireland
Zhiwen Yu, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China