The First Workshop on Normative Design and Evaluation of Recommender Systems (NORMalize) will be co-located with the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, 18-22nd September 2023. NORMalize is co-organized by Lien Michiels (Universiteit Antwerpen).
NORMalize sets out to provide a platform for researchers and practicioners from different domains to discuss challenges related to the normative design and evaluation of recommender systems. Recommender systems are used in a many different domains, from recommending recipes to song playlists. They increasingly act as "gatekeepers" to what users are exposed to online. Therefore it is important that we, as designers of these systems, think about the norms and values appropriate to the domain when designing and evaluating these recommender systems, such that they have a positive impact on society.
Should recipe recommenders prioritize healthy choices over not so healthy choices? Or should they prioritize sustainability and recommend recipes that make use of local, fresh ingredients? Or maybe we need both?
Should news recommenders provide sufficiently diverse recommendations? Should we strive to expose users to content that contradicts their political beliefs?
At NORMalize, we aim to provide some preliminary answers to the above questions, and many more through guided discussions that bring together industry and academia and scholars from different research domains.
Submissions
NORMalize invites original work in the form of full papers, short papers and extended abstracts. More details and the call for papers can be found here.
(Cover image by Hu Chen)