RECSYS

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 8th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2014) held between October 6th and 10th in Foster City, Silicon Valley, U.S.A. The annual RecSys conference is the premier international forum that brings together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to share their challenges, research results, and experiences in the broad field of recommender systems. RecSys 2014 features keynote talks, research paper presentations, industry sessions, poster sessions, workshops, tutorials, demonstrations, a doctoral symposium, and the RecSys Challenge.

The success of a conference largely depends on the quality of the submitted works. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the authors for submitting their original research to Recsys 2014. The RecSys conference has seen remarkable growth since its inception as Recommenders 06 Summer School on the Present and Future of Recommender Systems. It has evolved into a full-fledged, top research conference since 2007, underscoring the increasing role and significant challenges related to recommender systems. This year we received a record number of 234 submissions and accepted 35 long papers for oral presentation (acceptance rate 23%) and 20 short papers for poster presentation (acceptance rate 24%).

The RecSys conference is driven by real-world challenges. The key topics covered in this year's research program include ranking and top-n recommendations (7.5% of papers), matrix factorization (5.6%), cold start (5.6%), implicit feedback (4.3%), context awareness (3.6%), metrics and evaluation (3.5%), novel applications (2.9%), and more.

The quality of a conference program also depends on the competence and hard work of its devoted volunteers. To select the 55 accepted papers out of the initial 234 submissions, this year, we implemented a two-tier review process, where each paper received detailed reviews from three program committee members, followed by a meta-review by a senior program committee member. Our entire committee involved 20 senior and 102 regular Program Committee members. We are extremely grateful to all the PC members for volunteering their time to generate more than 900 detailed and insightful reviews and discussions.

In addition to the technical paper program, the program provides a diverse array of exciting venues for our attendees to interact with top experts from academia and industry on topics related to recommender systems. We are very fortunate to have three world-class keynote speakers this year spanning industry and academia, providing inspirational talks on cutting-edge challenges and directions in the field. We also feature an industry program capitalizing on being located in Silicon Valley's backyard. The invited industry speakers include renowned executives from top Silicon Valley companies, and representatives of new age companies using Recommender Systems in unique and disruptive ways. In addition, this year's program will host an industry panel discussing the topic of using smart systems monitoring and guiding our socio-digital experience. Our poster and demonstration event showcases numerous posters and nine live system demonstrations. Before and after the main conference, four tutorials and nine workshops will be held, including the RecSys Challenge. In addition, nine students were selected and invited to participate in the doctoral symposium of the conference.