Call for Opinions

AltRecSys Workshop on Alternative, Unexpected, and Critical Ideas in Recommendation

The AltRecSys workshop provides a venue to discuss interesting, preliminary, offbeat, unexpected, and critical ideas in recommender systems that do not (yet) fit well into the kinds of publications and formats for the main conference or traditional workshops.

AltRecSys aims to serve as a collaborative forum where researchers, (industry) practitioners, and other associated stakeholders can exchange ideas and together identify areas of study and new questions to expand the discussions and research agendas of the RecSys community in future years. To that end, we invite contributions responding to the following question: “What are the vital questions, needs, or opportunities the RecSys community is currently overlooking?”

Remember that AltRecSys is not meant to be a platform to disseminate the latest research advances in the RecSys area. Instead, fitting contributions to this workshop may include, but are not limited to:

  • Interesting and/or provocative ideas in the recommendation space that are too preliminary for a research paper but would benefit from community discussion.
  • Lessons learned from negative results, failed experiments, and other outcomes that yield potentially useful and/or interesting insights into recommender systems research or practice.
  • Perspectives that document and question foundational assumptions that are often taken for granted in RecSys work.
  • Methods-only research descriptions, to provoke discussion about proposed research designs before they are carried out or results are known.

We will consider several forms of submissions, including the following:

  • Extended abstracts of up to 500 words describing the opinion, perspective, or idea.
  • Short videos of up to 3 minutes.
  • Podcasts of up to 30 minutes.
  • Panel, where you propose up to 3 panelists and a theme.

In the spirit of this workshop, we are also open to creative styles of submissions. All will be editorially reviewed to curate a set of contributions that will prompt a diverse and vibrant discussion in the workshop.

This will be a highly interactive workshop; accepted contributions will be distributed on the workshop website and via e-mail to participants in advance of the workshop to seed the discussion.

Important Information

Submission link

  • Submission deadline: August 30th, 2024
  • Notification: September 13th, 2024
  • Final version deadline: September 30th, 2024

For more information, visit the workshop website: or contact workshop organizers: altrecsys@fastmail.com.

Michael Ekstrand, Alan Said & Sole Pera AltRecSys co-organizers