Recommendation and personalization research is no longer confined to computer science. Relevant questions are actively explored across disciplines including information systems, communication science, management, cognitive science, psychology, education, media studies, marketing, and the social sciences, often grounded in distinct theories, methods, and evaluation traditions. ‘Beyond Algorithms: A Workshop on the Interdisciplinarity of Recommender Systems’ (BEYOND 2026) aims to create a dedicated space at ACM RecSys 2026 to connect these perspectives.
The workshop highlights how insights from adjacent fields can complement, extend, and sometimes challenge computing-centric approaches. It explicitly welcomes contributions studying recommendation, personalization, and related phenomena outside core computing venues, as well as integrative work that bridges computational and non-computational approaches. Through presentations and interactive discussions, we aim to surface diverse theoretical frameworks, methodological traditions, and evaluation paradigms. Our goal is to foster dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, make disciplinary assumptions explicit, and identify shared research challenges and opportunities for collaboration. By strengthening ties between the RecSys community and neighboring research traditions, BEYOND 2026 seeks to broaden participation and visibility for interdisciplinary research and to position RecSys as a hub for both technical innovation and cross-disciplinary exchange.