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CALL FOR PAPERS
4TH WORKSHOP ON CONTEXT-AWARE RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS (CARS-2012)
(In conjunction with the 6th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems)
September 9, 2012 - Dublin, Ireland

http://www.cars-workshop.org

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This workshop builds upon the success of the previous three Workshops on
Context-Aware Recommender Systems held in New York (2009), Barcelona (2010),
and Chicago (2011), which brought together an international group of
researchers to explore the importance and use of contextual information in
recommender systems as well as to discuss new research directions.

The importance of contextual information has been recognized by researchers
and practitioners in many disciplines, including e-commerce personalization,
information retrieval, ubiquitous and mobile computing, data mining,
marketing, and management. While a substantial amount of research has
already been performed in the area of recommender systems, the vast majority
of existing approaches focuses on recommending the most relevant items to
users and does not take into account any additional contextual information,
such as time, location, weather, or the company of other people. Therefore,
this workshop aims to bring together researchers with wide-ranging
backgrounds to identify important research questions, to exchange ideas from
different research disciplines, and, more generally, to facilitate
discussion and innovation in the area of context-aware recommender systems
(CARS). In particular, topics of interest for this workshop include (but
are not limited to):

-- Context modeling techniques for recommender systems;
-- Context-aware user modeling for recommender systems;
-- Data sets for context-dependent recommendations;
-- Algorithms for detecting the relevance of contextual data;
-- Algorithms for incorporating contextual information into recommendation process;
-- Algorithms for building explicit dependencies between contextual featuresand ratings;
-- Interacting with context-aware recommender systems;
-- Novel applications for context-aware recommender systems;
-- Mobile context-aware recommender systems;
-- Context-aware group recommendations;
-- Large-scale context-aware recommender systems;
-- Evaluation of context-aware recommender systems.

In case the main topic of the paper is a challenging dataset for
context-aware recommender systems, the author(s) should describe the data
model and the main features of this dataset, and make the dataset available
for the research community.

PAPER SUBMISSION
The length of research submissions is 5 pages in the standard ACM SIG proceedings
format. We also encourage the submission of industry papers, which can have a
length of 2-5 pages. Microsoft Word and LaTeX templates for papers in ACM SIG
format are provided at:

http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates

All submissions must be in English and the files should be in PDF format.
Paper submissions and reviews will be handled electronically; each paper
will be evaluated by the workshop program committee based on originality,
significance, technical soundness, and clarity. All papers must be
submitted through the CARS-2012 page on the EasyChair conference management
site (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cars2012).

ACCEPTED PAPERS
Authors will present their work at the workshop. Depending on the number of
submissions, we are planning to have presentations in front of the workshop
audience as well as a poster session, in which participants can discuss their
ideas. The accepted papers will be made available on the workshop website.
It is planned to publish the proceedings on CEUR as well.

The workshop will NOT request the copyright transfer from the authors;
therefore, after receiving feedback at the workshop, the authors will be
able to submit the improved versions of their papers to conferences and
journals (the workshop organizers are currently exploring the possibilities
to organize a special issue on this topic in some research journal).

IMPORTANT DATES
Deadline for paper submission: June 18, 2012
Notification of acceptance: July 9, 2012

Please note that the deadline is final and we we can not grant any extension.

WORKSHOP CHAIRS
Gediminas Adomavicius, University of Minnesota, USA
Linas Baltrunas, Telefonica Research, Spain
Ernesto William De Luca, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany
Tim Hussein, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Alexander Tuzhilin, New York University, USA


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Licia Capra, University College London, UK
Matthias Boehmer, DFKI GmbH, Germany
Pablo Castells, Universidad Autononoma de Madrid, Spain
Michele Gorgoglione, Politecnico di Bari, Italy
Alexandros Karatzoglou, Telefonica Research, Spain
Neal Lathia, University of Cambridge, UK
Bamshad Mobasher, DePaul University, USA
Denis Parra, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Kenta Oku, Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Japan
Francesco Ricci, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Alan Said, TU Berlin, Germany
Yue Shi, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Barry Smyth, University College Dublin, Ireland