2nd Workshop on Context-awareness

in Retrieval and Recommendation

Ernesto W. De Luca Matthias Böhmer
Technische Universität Berlin DFKI GmbH
ernesto.deluca@dai-lab.de matthias.boehmer@dfki.de
Alan Said Ed Chi
Technische Universität Berlin Google Inc.
alan.said@dai-lab.de chi@acm.org
CONTENTS AND MAIN GOALS adapting information is accentuated when we consider this
Context-aware information is widely available in various ways kind of device- and interaction-based context.
and is becoming more and more important for enhancing re-
The aim of the CaRR Workshop is to invite the community to
trieval performance and recommendation results. The current
a discussion in which we will try to find new creative ways to
main issue to cope with is not only recommending or retriev-
handle context-awareness. Furthermore, the workshop aims
ing the most relevant items and content, but defining them
on exchanging new ideas between different communities in-
ad hoc. Further relevant issues are personalizing and adapt-
volved in research, such as HCI, machine learning, informa-
ing the information and the way it is displayed to the users
tion retrieval and recommendation.
current situation and interests. Ubiquitous computing further
provides new means for capturing user feedback on items and
providing information. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The workshop is especially intended for researchers work-
The first workshop [1] received an enthusiastic feedback from ing on multidisciplinary tasks who want to discuss problems
the context-awareness community with a total of 15 submit- and synergies. We are interested in ideas about creative and
ted papers and more than 30 attendees at IUI 2011 in Palo collaborative approaches for context-aware retrieval and rec-
Alto. 9 papers were accepted and presented. This is a clear in- ommendation.
dication that ”context-awareness in retrieval and recommen-
dation” is a very interesting and timely topic. We looked into The participants are encouraged to address the following ques-
how context-awareness has changed the goal of retrieval and tions:
recommendation, e.g. drifting from recommendations that fit • What is context?
to the general user interest to ad-hoc recommendations that fit
to the user’s context. Additionally, we discussed new emerg- • Is context-awareness in retrieval and recommendation nec-
ing areas where the role retrieval and recommendation in- essary?
creases, e.g. recommending places to go, activities to take,
or apps to use. • Which benefits come from context-aware retrieval and rec-
ommendation systems?
In this 2nd edition of the CaRR workshop we want to con-
tinue on focussing on the integration of context for retrieval • How do user interfaces handle context?
and recommendation. We recognize a general content context
and a user-centric content context. A general content con- • In what ways can context improve HCI?
text is a common case defined by time, weather, location and
many similar other aspects. A user-centric content context is • How can we combine general- and user-centric context-
given by the content of user profiles such as language, inter- aware technologies?
ests, devices used for interaction, etc.
• How should context affect the way information is presented?
Another important issue to address is the importance of de-
veloping context-aware systems that can generate and present • Which new means for collecting user feedback does Ubi-
situation-specific information. The need of personalizing and Comp provide?
• What new type of items (beyond books, news and movies)
are worth recommending by means of context-aware sys-
tems (e.g. places, friends, apps)?
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
TOPICS
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies
bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the fol-
republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific lowing aspects:
permission and/or a fee.
IUI 2012, February 14–17, 2012, Lisbon, Portugal. • Context-aware information retrieval
Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1048-2/12/02...$10.00.
• Context-aware profiling, clustering and collaborative filter-
ing
• Machine learning for context-aware information retrieval
and ontology learning
• Ubiquitous and context-aware computing
• Use of context-aware technologies in UI/HCI
• Context-aware advertising
• Recommendations for mobile users
• Context-awareness in portable devices
WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
Ernesto William De Luca is Head of the Competence Center
for Information Retrieval and Machine Learning at the DAI
Lab, Technische Universität Berlin. He is author of more than
60 papers on national and international conferences and jour-
nals in the fields of Computational Linguistics, Information
Retrieval, Adaptive Systems and other related areas. He has
chaired a number of workshops on semantic personalization,
context-awareness in recommender systems and related top-
ics.
Matthias Böhmer is a researcher at the Innovative Retail
Laboratory of the German Research Center for Artificial In-
telligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken, Germany. His main re-
search focus is on context-aware recommender systems that
suggest mobile applications. He is interested in deducing the
contextual relevance of particular apps from a users device
interaction, e.g. usage patterns or icon arrangement.
Alan Said is a research associate at the Competence Center
for Information Retrieval and Machine Learning at the DAI
Lab, Technische Universität Berlin. He has authored papers
on national and international conferences in the fields of rec-
ommender systems, social networks, context-awareness and
other related areas. He has organized and been involved in
workshops on recommender systems and related topics.
Ed H. Chi is a Research Scientist at Google. Until very re-
cently, he was the Area Manager and a Principal Scientist
at Palo Alto Research Center’s Augmented Social Cognition
Group. He led the group in understanding how Web 2.0 and
Social Computing systems help groups of people to remem-
ber, think and reason. Ed completed his three degrees (B.S.,
M.S., and Ph.D.) in 6.5 years from University of Minnesota,
and has been doing research on user interface software sys-
tems since 1993. He has been featured and quoted in the
press, including the Economist, Time Magazine, LA Times,
and the Associated Press.
PROGRAM COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
• Omar Alonso, Microsoft, USA
• Hideki Asoh, AIST, Japan
• Linas Baltrunas, Telefonica Research, Spain
• Toine Bogers, Royal School of Library Information Sci-
ence, Denmark
• Robin Burke, DePaul University, USA
• Li Chen, Hong Kong Baptist University, China
• Karen Church, Telefonica Research, Spain
• Marco Degemmis, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
• Ido Guy, IBM, Israel
• Qi He, IBM, USA
• Tim Hussein, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
• Brijnesh-Johannes Jain, TU-Berlin, Germany
• Dietmar Jannach, TU-Dortmund, Germany
• Alexandros Karatzoglou, Telefonica Research, Spain
• Carsten Kessler, University of Mnster, Germany
• Alfred Kobsa, University of California, Irvine, USA
• Antonio Krüger, DFKI, Saarbrcken, Germany
• Michael Kruppa, DFKI, Berlin, Germany
• Martha Larson, TU-Delft, The Netherlands
• Ulf Leser, Humboldt-UniversitŁt zu Berlin, Germany
• Pasquale Lops, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
• Petteri Nurmi, HIIT, Finnland
• Till Plumbaum, DAI Lab/Technische UniversitŁt Berlin,
Germany
• Francesco Ricci, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
• Markus Schedl, Johannes Kepler University, Austria
• Armando Stellato, University of Tor Vergata, Rome, Italy
• Domonkos Tikk, Gravity R&D, Hungary
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The organizers would like to thank all the authors for con-
tributing to CaRR 2011 and all the members of the program
committee for ascertaining the scientic quality of the work-
shop.
REFERENCES
1. E. W. De Luca, A. Said, M. Böhmer, and F. Michahelles.
Workshop on context-awareness in retrieval and
recommendation. In Proceedings of the 16th international
conference on Intelligent user interfaces, IUI ’11, pages
471–472, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.