Long-time readers know that I have strong opinions about academic conferences. I find the main value of conferences and workshops to be facilitating face-to-face interaction among researchers and practitioners who share professional interests. An offline version of LinkedIn, if you will.
This year, I’m focusing my attention on three conferences: RecSys, HCIR, and CIKM. Regrettably I won’t be able to attend SIGIR, Strata NY, or UIST. But fortunately my colleagues are attending the first two, and hopefully some UIST attendees will be able to arrive a few days early and attend HCIR. Perhaps we can steal a page from WSDM and CSCW and arrange a cross-conference social in Cambridge.
6th ACM Recommender System Conference (RecSys 2012)
At RecSys, which will take place September 9-13 in Dublin,I’m co-organizing the Industry Track with Yehuda Koren. The program features technology leaders from Facebook, Microsoft, StumbleUpon, The Echo Nest, Yahoo, and of course LinkedIn. I’m also delivering a keynote at the Workshop on Recommender Systems and the Social Web. I hope to see you there, along with several of my colleagues who will be presenting their work on recommender systems at LinkedIn.
6th Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR 2012)
The 6th HCIR represents a milestone — we’ve upgraded from a 1-day worksop to a 2-day symposium. We are continuing two great traditions: strong keynotes (Marti Hearst) and the HCIR Challenge (focused on people search). The symposium will take place October 4-5 in Cambridge, MA. Hope to see many of you there. And, if you’re still working on your submissions and challenge entries, good luck wrapping them up by the July 29 deadline!
21st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2012)
Finally, you can’t miss CIKM in Hawaii! This year’s conference will take place October 29 – November 2 in Maui. After co-organizing last year’s industry track in Glasgow, I’m delighted to be a speaker in this year’s track, which also includes researchers and practitioners from Adobe, eBay, Google, Groupon, IBM, Microsoft, Tencent, Walmart Labs, and Yahoo. A great program in one of the world’s most beautiful settings, how can you resist?
I hope to see many of you at one — hopefully all! — of these great events! But, if you can’t make it, be reassured that I’ll blog about them here.
The Noisy Channel 