Workshop goals

Web Personalization and recommendation systems have been steadily gaining ground as essential components of today’s Web based applications, including in e-commerce and customer relationship management, in the delivery of business services, in providing support for Web search and navigation, and in reducing cognitive overload in information rich interactive social Web applications. The proliferation of Web 2.0 applications has allowed users to go beyond simple consumers of information and instead actively participate in shaping collaborative environments in which users, resources, and user-provided content are all networked together. This, in turn has increased the need for more intelligent and personalized services that help users interact with and navigate these complex information spaces. These include a new generation of recommender systems that integrate multiple online channels, are more scalable, are more adaptive, can better handle user interactivity, and are more adept at user preference elicitation. To achieve this, such applications must rely on intelligent techniques from AI, machine learning, Web mining, statistics, and user modelling in order to leverage all available data, including the usage and click-stream data (reflecting user behaviour), the content and meta-data associated with resources, semantic domain knowledge, user profile information, and underlying network structures. Efficient and intelligent techniques are needed to mine this data for actionable knowledge, and to effectively use the discovered knowledge to enhance the users' experience.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners From Web Mining, Web Personalization, Recommender Systems, and User Modeling communities in order to foster an exchange of information and ideas and to facilitate a discussion of current and emerging topics related to the development of intelligent Web personalization and Recommender Systems. This workshop represents the 8th in a successful series of ITWP workshops that have been held at IJCAI and AAAI since 2001 and would be – after the successful events at AAAI'07, AAAI'08, and IJCAI’09 - the 3rd combined workshop on ITWP and Recommender Systems.