Workshop on Recommender Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (RecSysTEL)

Deadline extended: July 1st

This year's continuation for our previous work on SIRTEL-workshops is a jointly organised workshop called RecSysTEL in conjunction with:

• 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2010)
• 5th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2010)

It takes place in Barcelona, Spain, 29-30 September 2010

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Joseph Konstan, GroupLens Research, University of Minnesota (USA)

AIM & TOPICS

Technology enhanced learning (TEL) aims to design, develop and test socio-technical innovations that will support and enhance learning practices of both individuals and organisations. It is an application domain that generally addresses all types of
technology research & development aiming to support of teaching and learning activities. Information retrieval is a pivotal activity in TEL, and the deployment of recommender systems has attracted increased interest during the past years.

Recommendation methods, techniques and systems open an interesting new approach to facilitate and support learning and teaching. There are plenty a resource available on the Web, both in terms of digital learning content and people resources (e.g. other learners,
experts, tutors) that can be used to facilitate teaching and learning tasks. The challenge is to develop, deploy and evaluate systems that provide learners and teachers with meaningful guidance in order to help identify suitable learning resources from a potentially overwhelming variety of choices.

The aim of the Workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners that are working on topics related to the design, development and testing of recommender systems in educational
settings as well as present the current status of research in this area and create cross-disciplinary liaisons between the RecSys and EC-TEL communities. Overall, it aims to outline the rich potential of TEL as an application area for recommender systems, as well as expose participants to the challenges of developing such systems in a TEL context.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• User tasks to be supported by recommender systems in TEL
• Focus of recommendation in TEL
• Requirements for the deployment of TEL recommender systems
• Publicly available data sets for TEL recommender systems
• Recommendation algorithms and systems for TEL
• Transfer of successful algorithms and systems from other application areas
• Evaluation criteria and methods for TEL recommender systems

IMPORTANT DATES

• 20 June 2010: Submissions
• 16 July 2010: Notifications
• 1 August 2010: Camera-ready of accepted papers
• 29-30 September 2010: RecSysTEL Workshop in Barcelona

DATATEL CHALLENGE

Published datasets in recommender systems, such as the MovieLens and EachMovie ones, are very often used in experimental testing of new recommendation algorithms.
Very few datasets are publicly made available online for TEL applications.
Thus, it is not possible yet for TEL recommender systems' researchers to apply and benchmark their algorithms on existing, public datasets.

To this end, the dataTEL Theme Team of the European STELLAR Network of Excellence (http://www.teleurope.eu/pg/groups/9405/datatel/) is sponsoring the dataTEL Challenge: a call for TEL datasets that invites research groups to submit existing datasets from TEL applications that can be used as input for TEL recommender systems (e.g. ratings, tags, bookmarks).

The winner of the dataTEL Challenge will receive a best TEL dataset award.

More about the dataTEL Challenge:
http://www.teleurope.eu/pg/pages/view/9519/
http://adenu.ia.uned.es/workshops/recsystel2010/datatel.htm


SUBMISSIONS

The Workshop accepts a variety of submission types:

• Full papers: 12 pages
• Short papers: 6 pages
• System/service demos: 2 pages
• TEL Data sets: 2 pages and data set file (specs/format to be announced soon)

Papers should be original and not previously submitted to other venues.
Submission will be available through the EasyChair submission system:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=recsystel2010

If you haven't an EasyChair account yet, you'll be asked to create it before you can access the RecSysTEL'10 page.


PUBLICATION

Workshop proceedings will be published in a seperate volume by a publisher
that will be announced soon.

In addition, authors of best full papers will be invited to submit a revised version
of their manuscripts for a Special Issue in a prestigious international journal
such as the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies.


STEERING COMMITTEE

• Jesus G. Boticario, aDeNu - Spanish National University for Distance Education (Spain)
• Peter Brusilovksy, University of Pittsburgh (USA)
• Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
• Denis Gillet, Swiss Federal Institute of Lausanne (Switzerland)
• Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz (Austria)
• Peter Scott, Open University (UK)
• Riina Vuorikari, European Schoolnet (Belgium)
• Fridolin Wild, Open University (UK)
• Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer FIT (Germany)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

• Liliana Ardissono, Universita di Torino (Italy)
• Katrin Borcea-Pfitzmann, Dresden University of Technology (Germany)
• Julien Broisin, IRIT Universite Paul Sabatier (France)
• Carlos Delgado Kloos, Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain)
• Stavros Demetriadis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece)
• Jon Dron, Athabasca University (Canada)
• Rosta Farzan, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
• Alexander Felfernig, Graz University of Technology (Austria)
• Rick D. Hangartner, Strands (USA)
• Eelco Herder, L3S (Germany)
• Tsukasa Hirashima, Hiroshima University (Japan)
• Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University (Germany)
• Martin Memmel, DFKI GmbH (Germany)
• Pedro J. MuÒoz-Merino, Carlos III University of Madrid (Spain)
• Brandon Muramatsu, MIT (USA)
• Wolfgang Nejdl - L3S & Leibniz Universit‰t Hannover (Germany)
• Xavier Ochoa, Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral (Ecuador)
• Mimi Recker, Utah State University (USA)
• Christoph Rensing, TU Darmstadt (Germany)
• Hans-Christian Schmitz, Fraunhofer FIT (Germany)
• Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcala (Spain)
• Sergey Sosnovsky,DFKI GmbH (Germany)

CO-CHAIRS

• Nikos Manouselis, Greek Research & Technology Network (Greece)
• Hendrik Drachsler, Open Universiteit Nederlands (The Netherlands)
• Katrien Verbert, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)
• Olga C. Santos, aDeNu - Spanish National University for Distance Education (Spain)

ABOUT RecSys 2010 and EC-TEL 2010

The 4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2010) is the premier annual event
on research and applications of recommender technologies. It will promote a close interaction
among practitioners and researchers, reaching a wider range of participants
including those from Europe and Asia. See http://recsys.acm.org/2010/ for details.


The 5th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2010) brings together technological developments, learning models, and implementations of new and innovative approaches to training and education. The conference traditionally explores how the synergy of multiple disciplines can provide new, more effective and more especially more sustainable, technology-enhanced learning solutions to learning problems. See http://www.ectel2010.org for details.

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