Proceedings of the 2012 RecSys workshop on Personalizing the local mobile experience

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2012 RecSys Workshop on Personalizing the Local Mobile Experience. The growing popularity of location-enabled mobile phones and location-based services offers a great opportunity to apply personalization and recommender system technology to people's everyday lives. Personalization and recommender systems can be used to recommend new places and events that users may find interesting to visit, but, more broadly, these technologies can be used to personalize and enhance any service that people find themselves using. But how do we model such behaviors, what type of innovative applications, interfaces and interactions can we design, what types of content can we recommend and how do we engage, persuade and incentivize users while on-the-move? Location-based recommendations are everywhere. Recommendations for local places, things, and even people nearby are now standard practice across many commercial services; mobile ads, Google mobile search, foursquare recommendations, Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc. But how well are these actually suited to people's local needs? And how much fun is it to explore the world through the lens of recommendations? Our active RecSys 2012 workshop program explores local mobile experiences from two directions. First, we examine the role of personalization and recommendation in local mobile applications through interactive presentations and discussions by technical paper authors. Second, we'll spend half a day exploring Dublin using local recommender systems, on-the-spot. We'll be using commercial systems, and any services that participants themselves may have built -- and we'll explore what's great, what's missing, and where our research should be heading. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and developers from both academia and industry to exchange experiences, insights and strategies in (1) personalizing local mobile applications and (2) generating local recommendations that fit local user needs. We aim to generate an overview of local considerations that can be applied by both researchers and practitioners in their work, to spur on future research and to have fun! We hope that the workshop proceedings and learning outcomes from the outdoor activity will serve as a valuable, thought-provoking resource for designers, researchers and developers working within the local mobile recommendation space.