[agents] CFP CrowdRec Workshop in Conjunction with ACM RecSys

[Alan Said]

==== CALL FOR PAPERS ====

CrowdRec 2014: Second ACM RecSys Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Human
Computation for Recommender Systems
http://crowdrecworkshop.org

Held in conjunction with ACM Recommender Systems 2014
Silicon Valley, California, USA, 6th-10th October 2014

Human computation is the application of human intelligence to solve
problems that computers cannot yet solve. Crowdsourcing scales up the power
of human intelligence, by calling on a large number of human contributors,
referred to as the Crowd. Recently, many areas of research have awakened to
the potential of techniques that gather input from human contributors.
However, the opportunities are particularly promising for recommender
systems, whose reliance on expressions of human preference, e.g., ratings,
in huge quantities already qualifies them as crowd-driven technology. In
focusing heavily on human preference, however, today’s recommender systems
fall short of the benefits of actively integrating the full potential of
human intelligence. The purpose of the CrowdRec workshop is to provide a
forum for exchange and discussion on how human intelligence and crowd
techniques can be used to improve recommender systems.

A wide range of possibilities exists for effectively collecting intelligent
input from humans and for incentivizing the Crowd to make specific
contributions. Collection of input can occur in social communities, via
large online crowdsourcing platforms such as Mechanical Turk, or by way of
a variety of applications that use principles of gamification to engage
users. Crowdmembers can directly contribute information (such as comments
and reviews), can validate information (such as tags or descriptions), or
can provide feedback on recommender system design or performance. At
present, however, the Crowd remains notoriously difficult to exploit
effectively. The challenge arises from the complexity of user and
crowdmember communities. Such groups constitute dynamic systems that are
highly sensitive to changes in the form and the parameterization of their
activities. A thorough understanding of how best to present tasks to the
Crowd, and to make use of intelligent input, will be crucial in recommender
systems to benefit from crowdsourcing and human computation.

The CrowdRec Workshop encourages contributions focusing on new approaches,
new concepts, new methodologies and new applications that combine human
computation/crowdsourcing with conventional recommender systems. Topics
include, but are not limited to, the following:

Human Contributions beyond the User-Item Matrix
-Applications and interfaces for collecting annotations,
-Games With A Purpose (GWAP) or other annotation-as-by-product designs,
-Effective Learning from crowd-annotated or crowd-augmented datasets,
-Mining social media to support recommendation,
-Conversational recommender systems,
-Wisdom of the Crowd for decisions support.

Designing and Evaluating Recommenders using Crowd Techniques
-Recommender evaluation metrics and studies,
-Crowd-based user studies,
-Human intelligence for personalization support,
-User modeling and profiling,

Methodologies for Human Intelligence in Recommender Systems
-Identifying expertise and managing reputation,
-Engaging crowdmembers and ensuring quality,
-Tools and platforms to support crowd-enhanced Recommender Systems,
-Inherent biases, limitations and trade-offs of crowd-powered approaches,
-Empirical and case studies of crowd-enhanced recommendation,
-Ethical, cultural and policy issues related to crowd recommendation.

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SUBMISSIONS
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CrowdRec 2014 welcomes submissions of full papers, as well as
short papers reporting work-in-progress. Full papers must be no
longer than 6 pages (inclusive of all figures, references, and
appendices).  Short papers are 2 pages, and will be presented as
Posters in an interactive setting.

All submissions must be written in English and must be formatted according
to the standard ACM SIG proceedings format. Papers will be judged on their
relevance, technical content and correctness, and the clarity of
presentation of the submitted work.

Detailed instructions for submission will be posted to the workshop website.

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PUBLICATIONS
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Each accepted paper requires at least one of the authors to register for
the workshop.

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IMPORTANT DATES
---------------
Submission due: July 21, 2014
Author notification: August 21, 2014
Camera-ready due: August 30, 2014
Workshop date: During ACM RecSys 6th-10th October 2014 (Exact date to be
announced)

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ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
--------------------
Paolo Cremonesi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, paolo.cremonesi at polimi.it
Alexandros Karatzoglou, Telefonica Research, Spain, alexk at tid.es
Martha Larson, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands,
m.a.larson at tudelft.nl

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ADVISORY BOARD
--------------------
Thank you to the workshop’s past organizers for providing their support as
advisors.
Kuan-Ta Chen, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
Irwin King, The Chinese University of Hong Kong



-- 
-- 
Alan Said
Multimedia Computing Group
Delft University of Technology
e: alansaid at acm.org
t: @alansaid
w: www.alansaid.com