The 6th Workshop on Health Recommender Systems co-located with ACM RecSys 2024

The 6th Workshop on Health Recommender Systems co-located with ACM RecSys 2024

We are pleased to announce the Workshop on Health Recommender Systems co-located with the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, 18 October 2024, Bari, Italy.

Objectives

Background: The HealthRecSys workshop discussions over the years have spanned a broad spectrum of topics, reflecting the multifaceted nature of health recommender systems and the diverse applications and challenges of recommender systems in the health domain. Previous workshops encouraged discussions of the potential of recommender systems in the health domain, various new applications, associated challenges, and practical solutions for existing systems or scenarios. These discussions have not only introduced new challenges to the recommender system community but have also underscored the critical role of human oversight in ensuring the reliability and safety of health recommendations. The diversity of application domains discussed, from mental health to nutrition, and the variety of stakeholders involved, from patients to healthcare providers, underscore the complexity and importance of this research area.

Goals: Our aim with the 6th HealthRecSys is to reignite these conversations and provide a forward-thinking platform that revisits the foundational elements that have contributed to the field's growth. However, the workshop aspires to do more by infusing new perspectives and tackling the most pressing global challenges and technological innovations head-on. The workshop will explore contemporary themes such as the impact of global health crises on recommender systems, the integration of Large Language Models and other generative AI models in health applications, the increasing emphasis on personalized and self-managed care, and the increasing focus on health equity leading to consideration of literacy, accessibility and monetary means when building health recommender systems. These topics not only reflect the current state of the world but also align with the broader shifts towards ethical AI, and the need for systems that can adapt to and address individual health and care needs. Furthermore, HealthRecSys is dedicated to strengthening the network of researchers working on health recommender systems, drawing participants from an array of health and care domains. This effort is aimed at cultivating a cross-disciplinary community that promotes collaboration among recommender systems specialists, healthcare professionals, ethicists, and policymakers, among others. To enhance cross-sector collaboration, the 6th HealthRecSys workshop will encourage joint projects and funding prospects, in addition to promoting the sharing of resources, datasets, and tools among scholars and industry practitioners.

The workshop is calling for submissions on a wide array of topics within health recommender systems. This includes systems aimed at health promotion, preventive, curative care, and recommender systems that are health-aware. The scope of topics for the workshop is extensive, covering various aspects within the domain of health recommender systems and health-aware recommender systems, which include, but are not limited to:

Submission

We solicit short research papers (4-6 pages) and short position papers (2 pages + references), both in the ACM conference paper style-double-column format. Further details would follow. Participants can decide between a research focused submission and a project focused submission..

Submission category research: innovative research ideas, preliminary findings, or system prototypes that contribute new knowledge to the field

Submission category project: presentations on funded research initiatives, collaborations between industry and academia, or partnerships between healthcare entities and research institutions.

Submission guidelines: All submitted papers must

Submissions are encouraged to include links or demos as attachments to enhance their presentation. All submissions will undergo a rigorous peer-review process to ensure quality and originality. It is imperative that submitted works are not concurrently under review at any other conference, workshop, or journal and contain original, unpublished contributions. Accepted papers will be published according to the ACM RECSYS 2024 WS publication rules.

Please use the submission link provided by RecSys to submit your paper via EasyChair

Important dates

Program

Keynote: Cataldo Musto

Title: Healthy and Sustainable Food Recommendations Exploiting Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models

Abstract:
The growing focus on healthy and sustainable eating requires innovative tools to support personalized recommendations. This talk will examine how Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance food recommendation systems, enabling them to provide personalized suggestions that promote both individual well-being and environmental responsibility. In particular, we will first show the effectiveness of knowledge-aware recommendation models that encode information about healthy food consumption. Next, we emphasize the importance of natural language processing techniques, which can be used to nudge toward healthier food choices through automatically generated explanations. Finally, we will show recent advances aiming also to include the concept of sustainability in the design and development of conversational food recommenders. In particular, we will discuss a pipeline based on LLMs that identifies healthier and more sustainable food alternatives that can be suitable for the user. We will conclude the presentation by sketching several future directions of this exciting research line.

Bio:
Cataldo Musto is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Bari. His research focuses on the adoption of NLP, LLMs, and semantic content representation strategies in knowledge-aware recommender systems and AI algorithms. He authored around 90 scientific articles, and he is one of the authors of the textbook “Semantics in Adaptive and Personalized Systems: Methods, Tools and Applications'', edited by Springer. He is also involved in the organization of conferences such as ACM UMAP and ACM RecSys as Student Volunteers Chair in 2019, Social Chair in 2020, Poster and Demo Chair in 2022, Doctoral Symposium Chair in 2023, and Workshops Chair in 2024. In 2025, he will be the Program Chair of ACM UMAP conference. Since 2016, he has given several tutorials at UMAP and ESWC conferences about the exploitation of semantics-aware representation in content-based personalized systems. Since 2019, he has organized a series of workshops on Explainable User Modeling (ExUM), Knowledge-aware Recommender Systems (KARS) and Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI).

Schedule (Room D)

Accepted papers

Proceedings

Download the HealthRecSys 2024 proceedings as a single PDF file (30 Mb)

Committee

Workshop Chairs

Program Committee

Venue

Location

Please visit the RecSys 2024 website for more information about the virtual setting: https://recsys.acm.org/recsys24/location/

Contact

If you have questions regarding the workshop, do not hesitate to contact the workshop chairs: healthrecsys@gmail.com

Previous Workshops on Healthrecommender Systems

All papers of the 2020 Workshop in Health Recommender Systems can be found here.

All papers of the 2019 Workshop in Health Recommender Systems can be found here.

All papers of the 2018 Workshop in Health Recommender Systems can be found here.

All papers of the 2017 Workshop in Health Recommender Systems can be found here.

All papers of the 2016 Workshop in Health Recommender Systems can be found here.

© Workshop on Health Recommender Systems with RecSys 2024
Photo - ACM Recsys 2024