Two inspiring weeks at the RecSys Summer School and the conference

I’m back in the office after an exciting and busy time at the ACM Europe School on Recommender Systems 2024 and the RecSys conference. It was both a rewarding and inspiring experience.

At the summer school, I had the pleasure of giving a lecture on peer reviewing alongside Olivier Jeunen.

In addition, I stayed busy by hosting two workshops.

On Monday, we kicked off with MuRS: 2nd Music Recommender Systems Workshop 2024. Nancy Baym delivered a great keynote on music as communication. We also had a lively panel discussion with Maria Iglesias, Yu Liang, and Bruno Sguerra, exploring the impact of recommender systems on the music sector. The workshop featured eight presentations from both academic and industry researchers. You can access the workshop proceedings at https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3787/. A big thank you to Andrés and Lorenzo I enjoyed the teamwork!

On Friday, together with Alan Said and Eva Zangerle, I organized INTROSPECTIVES. The workshop began with a great keynote by Barry Smyth, analyzing three decades of recommender systems publications. We followed up with another lively panel discussion with Peter Brusilovsky, Olivier Jeunen, and Sole Pera. As expected, the audience was quick to engage in the debate. The question “Where do we come from and where do we go?” sparked a discussion that I believe needs to be continued…

I’m also very happy about the joint paper with Andrés Ferraro and Michael Ekstrand. In It’s not you, it’s me: the impact of choice models and ranking strategies on gender imbalance in music recommendation, we use simulations to study how algorithmic strategies or user behavior contribute to improvement (or loss) in gender fairness as models are repeatedly re-trained on new user feedback data. The conclusion: When it comes to longitudinal fairness, ‘it’s not you’ (the users), ‘it’s me’ (the recommender system). Rest assured, we will keep working on this topic. Stay tuned!

Additionally, the joint TORS paper with Alan Said and Eva Zangerle, Exploring the landscape of recommender systems evaluation: practices and perspectives, was selected to be presented as a poster at the conference.

I am deeply honored to have received a Women in RecSys Journal Paper of the Year Award 2024 for the TORS paper Where are the values? A systematic literature review on news recommender systems, co-authored with Karin van Es, Chandni Bagchi, and Olusanmi A. Hundogan. I had the pleasure giving a teaser presentation about this interdisciplinary work.

All in all, a busy yet incredibly inspiring time!