NSF Award
2427819
This is funding to partially support a Doctoral Research Symposium (workshop) of about 15 promising graduate students. This one day event will take place in Bari, Italy, in October 2024, in conjunction with the ACM 2024 ACM Recommender System Conference (RecSys). RecSys is the premier international forum for the presentation of new research results, systems, and techniques in the broad field of recommender systems. Recommender systems represent a vibrant and interdisciplinary field at the intersection of decision making, human-computer interaction, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. At their core, recommender systems aim to predict user preferences or interests and suggest items or actions that are likely to be relevant or desirable to them. These items could be anything from movies and music to products, news articles, or even potential connections in a social network. As RecSys brings together the main international research groups working on recommender systems, along with many of the world’s leading companies, it has become the most important annual conference for the presentation and discussion of recommender system research. Providing travel funding to support active participation of young researchers in this conference is very important for the health of the field and for the researchers themselves. <br/><br/>The goals of the symposium are 1) provide a supportive setting for feedback on students’ current research and guidance on future research directions; 2) offer each student feedback and fresh perspectives on their work from faculty and students outside their own institution; 3) promote the development of a supportive community of researchers and a spirit of collaborative research; and 4) contribute to the conference goals through interaction with other researchers and conference events. Students will apply through a widely advertised recruitment process and be selected by a program committee of faculty mentors who will consider their connection to the conference, their financial need, their representation of a diverse set of topics, institutions, and backgrounds, and their ability to benefit from and give back to the doctoral consortium. The consortium will be structure both to provide close 1-on-1 mentoring as well as broad opportunities to connect to the wider RecSys community.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
