21.10.2024DDIS Goes to RecSys 2024

This October, DDIS attended the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems in Bari, Italy.

Kathrin travelled to Bari one before conference to participate at the Europe School on Recommender Systems. The 21 lectures spanned topics such as a historical overview of key development in recommender systems research, the latest technical advances in several application areas, such as conversational, multimodal, or music recommendations, and best evaluation practices.

It offered not only an opportunity to learn about a plethora of topics but also a great option to connect with like-minded people. The organizers arranged two social events, a guided tour through Bari’s old town followed by a welcome reception and a social dinner at the beautiful Villa de Grecis. There were also plenty of socializing opportunities during the lunch and coffee breaks, which offered a variety of delicious local food and pastry options. But as it turns out, this was only a foreshadowing of what was to come during the main conference.

During the conference, Kathrin presented her PhD proposal on the evaluation of recommender systems explanations in the doctoral symposium.

Lucien presented at the main conference track, the Informfully resource paper for creating user-centered user epxeriments. Our open-source platform for reproducible research is a visualization layer that can be added on top of existing systems. This allows everyone to conduct user studies and evaluate their algorithms.

This year’s RecSys challenge was all about news recommenders, with a focus on beyond-accuracy objectives. In the Informfully challenge submission, our tool Informfully was used to create diversity-optimized news recommendations using random-walks.

Finally, during the NORMalize Workshop on the last day of RecSys, we showed the power of Informfully in a dataset paper to demonstrate the level of detail and insights you can get when using our platform.

Kathrin presenting her work at the Doctoral Symposium.

 

Lucien presenting the Informfully platform.

This year’s venue was something truly unique and spectacular. The RecSys main conference presentations took place at Teatro Petruzzelli… on the opera stage!

Coffee breaks took place in the nearby venues that were equally amazing...

...and there was so much food!

The Social Dinner took place at the Villa Romanazzi Carducci. It started with the grand spectacle to make your own Orecchiette, the typical pasta type of the region, and ended with karaoke. In between, there were plenty of opportunities to network and eat.