The Second AltRecSys Workshop on Reimagining Recommender Systems Research & Practice

Abstract

As the ACM RecSys Conference marks its 20th anniversary, we believe it is the right time to pause, take inventory, and reflect on what our field might have (inadvertently) overlooked due to its rapid growth and expanding real-world impact. This prompted the 2nd edition of AltRecSys—an alternative, provocative, and exploratory workshop set up to identify perspectives, questions, and directions that fall outside the classic framings of recommender system research and possibly question its fundamental assumptions. AltRecSys provides a space to reimagine RecSys research and practice by discussing work that is preliminary, offbeat, unexpected, and critical. Building on the lessons learned from the first edition, in this second iteration, we explore a central question: What have we, as a community, not been looking at? In particular, we examine the blind spots that have accumulated as recommender systems have become ubiquitous across domains, cultures, and institutions.