Social and Semantic aspects of recommender systems – RecSoc 2015
A workshop on advances in recommender systems
Room 570 - Education Building - 5th Floor
June 16-17, 2015
Organizers:
Tsvi Kuflik, The University of Haifa, tsvi.kuflik@gmail.com
Osnat (Ossi) Mokryn, The University of Haifa and Tel-Aviv Academic College, ossimo@gmail.com
Bracha Shapira, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, bracha.shapira@gmail.com
Lior Rockach, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, lior.rokach@gmail.com
The Social and Semantic Web offers new opportunities for recommender systems research. Leveraging commercial and social platforms, consumers have turned into active contributors, creating massive amounts of information, interacting and sharing opinions. Users of online social media provide explicitly and implicitly personal information and opinions through their interactions with other users or with resources (e.g. tagging, forming friendship relationships, rating, commenting, etc.). The social platforms, on their side, are designed in a way that nurtures and encourages interactions, and the sharing of personal information and opinions.
The age of online communities presents an opportunity for the research community. It opens a new avenue for searching, profiling, and providing large amount of users with recommendations in a variety of subjects, and from different aspects.
The RecSoc workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners in these areas from Academia and industry, and will provide graduate students with an opportunity to present their work and get feedback from local and international experts, thus bringing together the local RecSoc community.
The workshop will take place at the Caesarea–Rothschild Institute (CRI), University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
Researchers and grad students interested in an opportunity to present their work, should contact the organizers
Participation is free, but requires Registration.
Keynote Speakers
Bracha Shapira is a Professor and the head of the Information Systems Dept. at Ben Gurion University, Israel. Her main research interests are in the field of Information Retrieval (IR) and Information Filtering (IF), and its integration with machine-learning.
Pasquale Lops is Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. He received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bari in 2005 with a dissertation on “Hybrid Recommendation Techniques based on User Profiles”. His research interests include recommender systems, machine learning, user modelling and information filtering. He has served as a senior program committee member of RecSys 2014 and 2015 and as regular member since 2010.
Ido Guy is a Principal Research Engineer at Yahoo Labs Israel, focusing on analysis of large-scale social data. Previously, Ido established and managed the Social Technologies group at IBM Research-Haifa in 2007-2014. Ido has over 15 publications in the area of social recommender systems. He initiated the annual workshop on Social Recommender Systems and served as program co-chair for ACM RecSys 2012.
Erez Shmueli. Industrial engineering, Tel Aviv University, Israel; Media Lab, MIT, Boston, USA. Dr. Erez Shmueli is a senior lecturer at the department of Industrial Engineering at Tel-Aviv University and a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab. His main research interests include Big Data, Complex Networks, Computational Social Science and Information Security and Privacy. His professional experience includes five years as a software developer and a team leader in the Israeli Air-Force and three years as a project manager in Deutsche Telekom Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Osnat (Ossi) Mokryn is a Senior Lecturer at the Academic College Tel Aviv Yaffo, where she heads the Internet and Networks field, and a research affiliate in the Information Systems department in the University of Haifa. Her research focuses on social media mining, social and complex networks, and cloud content acceleration. Her professional experience includes consulting to leading Internet and research institutes and companies.
Mike Gartrell is a postdoctoral researcher at the Microsoft R&D Center in Herzliya, Israel. He received his PhD from the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2014. Mike’s research interests lie in the areas of recommender systems, social networks, and mobile context-aware systems. His recent work has focused on improving recommender systems for individuals and groups through the use of social indicators and social networks. Prior to his graduate work, Mike worked as a software engineer for over six years at HP.
Giovanni Semeraro, has a M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy, where he is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and teaches “Intelligent information access”, “Natural language processing”, and “Programming languages”. He is responsible for the Master of Science in Computer Science and leads the Semantic Web Access and Personalization (SWAP) research group “Antonio Bello” at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. He received 2 Italian National Scientific Qualification to full professor on January 2014 and January 2015. From 2006 to 2011 he was on the Board of Directors of AI*IA (Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence). Since 2009 he is member of the Technical Support Group "Innovation and Research" of the Productive District of Computer Science, established by the Region Apulia. He is author of more than 350 papers published in international journals, books, conference and workshop proceedings.