Personalization in Mobile Applications

ACM RecSys 2012. Dublin, Ireland. September 9-13, 2012

The PeMA workshop has merged with the LocalRec workshop.

News! The Local Experience workshop and the Personalizing Mobile Applications workshop have joined forces to offer RecSys attendees a more enjoyable and interactive full-day of talks, discussion and explorations in Dublin, Ireland!

The growing popularity of location-enabled mobile phones and location-based services offers a great opportunity to apply personalization and recommender system technology to people's everyday lives. Personalization and recommender systems can be used to recommend new places and events that users may find interesting to visit, but, more broadly, these technologies can be used to personalize and enhance any service that people find themselves using. But how do we model such behaviors, what type of innovative applications, interfaces and interactions can we design, what types of content can we recommend and how do we engage, persuade and incentivize users while on-the-move.

Location-based recommendations are everywhere. Recommendations for local places, things, and even people nearby are now standard practice across many commercial services; mobile ads, Google mobile search, foursquare recommendations, Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc. But how well are these actually suited to people¹s local needs? And how much fun is it to explore the world through the lens of recommendations?

This active RecSys 2012 workshop explores local mobile experiences from two directions. First, we will examine the role of personalization and recommendation in local mobile applications through interactive presentations and discussions. Second, we¹ll spend half a day exploring Dublin using local recommender systems, on-the-spot. We¹ll be using commercial systems, and any services that participants themselves may have built ­ and we¹ll explore what's great, what¹s missing, and where our research should be heading.

Let us know about your background, and join us in Dublin for what promises to be an interactive, insightful and fun RecSys workshop!

Submission Deadline: June 8, 2012

This workshop follows from the 1st PeMA Workshop at ACM RecSys 2011 in Chicago (summary):
The rise of location-enabled mobile phones and location based services offers a great opportunity to apply personalization and recommender system technology to people's everyday lives. A variety of digital traces can now be used to infer how people move about their city and extract their context and habits. Personalization and recommender systems, potentially merged with the data that people store online (e.g., social networks, web ratings), can then not only be used to recommend new places and events that they may find interesting to attend, but, more broadly, personalize and enhance any service that people find themselves using.

The workshop topics can be seen in the call for papers.