The 15th ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge centered around the recommendation of given names. Participants of the challenge implemented algorithms that were tested both offline - on data collected by the name search engine Nameling - and online within Nameling. Here, we describe both tasks in detail and discuss the publicly available datasets. We motivate and explain the chosen evaluation of the challenge, and we summarize the different approaches applied to the name recommendation tasks. Finally, we present the rankings and winners of the offline and the online phase.

Since the rise of collaborative tagging systems on the web, the tag recommendation task -- suggesting suitable tags to users of such systems while they add resources to their collection -- has been tackled. However, the (offline) evaluation of tag recommendation algorithms usually suffers from difficulties like the sparseness of the data or the cold start problem for new resources or users. Previous studies therefore often used so-called post-cores (specific subsets of the original datasets) for their experiments. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale experiment in which we analyze different tag recommendation algorithms on different cores of three real-world datasets. We show, that a recommender's performance depends on the particular core and explore correlations between performances on different cores.

Since the rise of collaborative tagging systems on the web, the tag recommendation task -- suggesting suitable tags to users of such systems while they add resources to their collection -- has been tackled. However, the (offline) evaluation of tag recommendation algorithms usually suffers from difficulties like the sparseness of the data or the cold start problem for new resources or users. Previous studies therefore often used so-called post-cores (specific subsets of the original datasets) for their experiments. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale experiment in which we analyze different tag recommendation algorithms on different cores of three real-world datasets. We show, that a recommender's performance depends on the particular core and explore correlations between performances on different cores.

With the rising popularity of smart mobile devices, sensor data-based applications have become more and more popular. Their users record data during their daily routine or specifically for certain events. The application WideNoise Plus allows users to record sound samples and to annotate them with perceptions and tags. The app is being used to document and map the soundscape all over the world. The procedure of recording, including the assignment of tags, has to be as easy-to-use as possible. We therefore discuss the application of tag recommender algorithms in this particular scenario. We show, that this task is fundamentally different from the well-known tag recommendation problem in folksonomies as users do no longer tag fix resources but rather sensory data and impressions. The scenario requires efficient recommender algorithms that are able to run on the mobile device, since Internet connectivity cannot be assumed to be available. Therefore, we evaluate the performance of several tag recommendation algorithms and discuss their applicability in the mobile sensing use-case.

With the rising popularity of smart mobile devices, sensor data-based applications have become more and more popular. Their users record data during their daily routine or specifically for certain events. The application WideNoise Plus allows users to record sound samples and to annotate them with perceptions and tags. The app is being used to document and map the soundscape all over the world. The procedure of recording, including the assignment of tags, has to be as easy-to-use as possible. We therefore discuss the application of tag recommender algorithms in this particular scenario. We show, that this task is fundamentally different from the well-known tag recommendation problem in folksonomies as users do no longer tag fix resources but rather sensory data and impressions. The scenario requires efficient recommender algorithms that are able to run on the mobile device, since Internet connectivity cannot be assumed to be available. Therefore, we evaluate the performance of several tag recommendation algorithms and discuss their applicability in the mobile sensing use-case.

With the rising popularity of smart mobile devices, sensor data-based applications have become more and more popular. Their users record data during their daily routine or specifically for certain events. The application WideNoise Plus allows users to record sound samples and to annotate them with perceptions and tags. The app is being used to document and map the soundscape all over the world. The procedure of recording, including the assignment of tags, has to be as easy-to-use as possible. We therefore discuss the application of tag recommender algorithms in this particular scenario. We show, that this task is fundamentally different from the well-known tag recommendation problem in folksonomies as users do no longer tag fix resources but rather sensory data and impressions. The scenario requires efficient recommender algorithms that are able to run on the mobile device, since Internet connectivity cannot be assumed to be available. Therefore, we evaluate the performance of several tag recommendation algorithms and discuss their applicability in the mobile sensing use-case.

The ever-growing flood of new scientific articles requires novel retrieval mechanisms. One means for mitigating this instance of the information overload phenomenon are collaborative tagging systems, that allow users to select, share and annotate references to publications. These systems employ recommendation algorithms to present to their users personalized lists of interesting and relevant publications. In this paper we analyze different ways to incorporate social data and metadata from collaborative tagging systems into the graph-based ranking algorithm FolkRank to utilize it for recommending scientific articles to users of the social bookmarking system BibSonomy. We compare the results to those of Collaborative Filtering, which has previously been applied for resource recommendation.

The web provides an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate innovation by evaluating ideas quickly and accurately using controlled experiments (e.g., A/B tests and their generalizations). Whether for front-end user-interface changes, or backend recommendation systems and relevance algorithms, online controlled experiments are now utilized to make data-driven decisions at Amazon, Microsoft, eBay, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Zynga, and at many other companies. While the theory of a controlled experiment is simple, and dates back to Sir Ronald A. Fisher’s experiments at the Rothamsted Agricultural Experimental Station in England in the 1920s, the deployment and mining of online controlled experiments at scale—thousands of experiments now—has taught us many lessons. We provide an introduction, share real examples, key learnings, cultural challenges, and humbling statistics.

The Challenge on Context-Aware Movie Recommendation (CAMRa) was conducted as part of a join event on Context-Awareness in Recommender Systems at the 2010 ACM Recommender Systems conference. The challenge focused on three context-aware recommendation tasks: time-based, mood-based, and social recommendation. The participants were provided with anonymized datasets from two real world online movie recommendation communities and competed against each other for obtaining the highest recommendation accuracy for each task. The datasets contained contextual features, such as mood, plot annotation, social network, and comments, normally not available in movie recommendation datasets. Over 40 teams from 20 countries participated in the challenge. Their participation was summarized by 10 papers accepted to the CAMRa workshop.

The challenge to provide tag recommendations for collaborative tagging systems has attracted quite some attention of researchers lately. However, most research focused on the evaluation and development of appropriate methods rather than tackling the practical challenges of how to integrate recommendation methods into real tagging systems, record and evaluate their performance. In this paper we describe the tag recommendation framework we developed for our social bookmark and publication sharing system BibSonomy. With the intention to develop, test, and evaluate recommendation algorithms and supporting cooperation with researchers, we designed the framework to be easily extensible, open for a variety of methods, and usable independent from BibSonomy. Furthermore, this paper presents a �rst evaluation of two exemplarily deployed recommendation methods.