Recommender systems (RS) are software implementations that provide suggestions for items to be of use to a user. These suggestions are intended to facilitate the decision-making process. RS can aid children, as well as parents and educators, in locating materials for learning and play, e.g., books, video contents, or digital games, that are not only of interest to the user, but are also developmentally and educationally appropriate. This in turn calls for new design and evaluation approaches--not only in terms of data and algorithms, but also in terms of UX, re-thinking the goals of recommendations when dealing with children, as well as the concept of trust and persuasion for this specific target group, taking into account critical issues such as ethics, privacy, and security.
Following the success and interest of participants in the first KidRec in Como, Italy (in conjunction with ACM Conference on Recommender Systems), we look forward to hold a second workshop at the upcoming 2018 IDC Conference.
The specific theme of this edition of KidRec will be on RS in the educational domain for children , but we welcome other research papers and position papers related to the design of recommender technologies for children.
A reflection on the complex issues associated with kid-related RS leads to several questions that need to be answered from an interdisciplinary perspective to allow for a holistic understanding of their impact on individual children. Given that children's access to online content is global, it also requires an international perspective that would incorporate best practice on the use of children's data for educational and commercial purposes from a global viewpoint. Current research lacks behind the reality of many software developments in this area and use of RS in formal and informal learning environments. In light of the urgency of issues such as potential misuse of children's personal data, and the scale of the use of RS in education worldwide, we feel it is necessary to bring an international, multidisciplinary community together to collectively map out the field of RS for children, and to begin to address these issues together.
Goals
As an interactive workshop, KidRec aims to congregate researchers and experts from multiple disciplines, in order to understand the ethical, pedagogical, and technical implications of designing and developing RS for children and educational activities. We intend to do this by accomplishing the following three main goals:
| Paper submission deadline | April 30, 2018 |
| Notification to authors | May 2, 2018 |
| Camera-Ready Version | May 7, 2018 |
| KidRec Workshop | June 19, 2018 |
Jerry Alan Fails
Boise State University
Maria Soledad Pera
Boise State University
Franca Garzotto
Polytechnic University of Milan
Natalia Kucirkova
UCL Institute of Education
We invite submissions related to recommender systems for children including papers concerned with: educational technology for children; recommender algorithms for children; recommendation explanations; privacy of children’s data; transparency; expert-in-the-Loop (e.g., teacher, parent); child-centered content domains (e.g., leisure, education); user profiling; personalization; gamification; mediation, to name a few.
We invite short papers (4-6 pages) discussing novel work in progress and position papers (2-4 pages) focusing on open challenges in promising research directions as well as speculative or innovative work in progress.
All papers should be submitted in the SIGCHI extended abstract format
All papers will be peer-reviewed, and must not be under review in any other conference, workshop or journal (at the time of submission).
