RECSYS

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 7th ACM Recommender Systems Conference (ACM RecSys 2013), held in Hong Kong on October 12-16. As RecSys enters the second half of its first decade, it has clearly established itself as the premier international venue for research and development in the field of Recommender Systems, where leading researchers and practitioners from around the world meet and discuss their latest results and solutions.

The growing prestige of the conference is reflected by the significant increase in the number of papers that were submitted to the technical program. The overall number of paper submissions went up 20% as compared to last year, with a total of 222 submissions. We received 136 full paper submissions, from which 32 were accepted (23.5%) for oral presentation and 18 were accepted as short papers and poster presentations. We received 80 short paper submissions, from which 24 were accepted (28.75%). Seven of these short papers were selected for short oral presentation and the remaining for poster presentation. For the first time this year, in addition to full and short papers, we also had a new category of submissions consisting of full-length industry papers. We received six papers in this category, out of which two papers were accepted and were presented during the industrial research session. To accommodate the large number of high-quality papers that we received and accepted, the number of research sessions has been increased to eight from the previous year's five sessions.

Besides the technical program, the conference's overall program also includes tutorials, workshops, a doctoral symposium, and demonstrations. The tutorial program includes four exciting tutorials covering state-of-the-art methods for building recommender systems and emerging application areas. The workshop program includes eight different one-day workshops that take place the two days prior to the main conference. The doctoral symposium showcases the work of six PhD students, whose work has been selected after a rigorous review process. Finally, the demonstration program contains five different demonstrations covering various aspects of recommender systems.

The conference program also includes three keynotes, one from an academic perspective by Oren Etzioni (University of Washington) and two from an industrial perspective by Dou Shen (Baidu) and Mu Yan (Beihe). Finally, continuing with the tradition of the conference, there is a strong integration of the research with its commercial applications. This is reflected through the strong participation of industry at the workshops, demonstrations, and technical program, as well as a special industrial session containing presentations of the accepted industry papers, invited talks, and panel discussions.