We are very pleased to announce ACM Recommender Systems 2008 (RecSys08), the annual event on research and applications of recommender technologies, where the recommendation industry and academia come together. MyStrands’ CEO, Francisco Martin, will repeat as Industry co-chair this year, along with Unilever’s Shail Patel.

This conference builds on the success of Recommenders06 Summer School organized by MyStrands in Bilbao in 2006, and the 1st International Conference in Minneapolis last year. In these events many members of the practitioner and research communities valued the rich exchange of ideas made possible by the shared plenary sessions.

Why should this matter to you? As our Chief Scientist Rick Hangartner recently wrote:

Search engines as we know them will never disappear. In the near term, search engines will increasingly incorporate simple recommender technologies to handle approximate queries … But in the long term, the recommender industry will be larger, and recommender technologies will be more pervasive than the search industry and search technology as we know it.

If this were not enough, this year’s event will take place in beautiful Lausanne, Switzerland.

ACM Recommender Systems 2008 is chaired by Pearl Pu, General Chair, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Please visit the RecSys08 website for further information regarding topics of interest, important dates and more.