NSF Student Travel Grant for 2022 ACM Recommender Systems Conference

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This is funding to partially support a Doctoral Research Symposium (workshop) of about 18 promising graduate students along with a panel of 8 distinguished researchers from academia and industry. This one day event will take place on Seattle in conjunction with the ACM 2022 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. Recommendation systems leverage past user behaviors and user similarities to suggest things that are tailored tailored to a user’s preferences, and are used in a variety of contexts including social media, ecommerce, health, and entertainment. 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 rising PhD students in the field will both enrich the conference with novel research and provide useful feedback for the students themselves. 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. During the symposium, each student will give a 15 minute presentation, followed by 20-25 minutes for feedback and discussion. Two of the symposium faculty will be assigned to provide primary feedback for each presenter; following this primary feedback there will be a period of open discussion with all participants. The feedback will be constructive with an eye towards shaping the field and upcoming participants in the research area, helping students understand and articulate how their work is positioned relative to related research, appropriately focus and scope their ideas for thesis research projects, and improve the choice and application of their methods and analyses. During the main conference, students will also present their dissertation work and plans in the form of a poster presentation; the work will be published in the RecSys main conference proceedings. The conference management committee will evaluate the doctoral research symposium, and the results will be made available to the organizers of future symposia.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.