Personalization and Recommender Systems in the Larger Context: New Directions and Research Questions (Keynote Speech)

My background is in building large-scale library automation systems and distributed networked information systems; these are areas where personalization has been very slow to arrive, and where recommender systems have met both cultural opposition (in part based in privacy concerns) and technical barriers. I have been a strong advocate of personalization in information retrieval systems; this seems to me to be a logical extension of the secular move towards personal machines and intelligent systems generally, but the promises here are still unrealized. Recommender systems have fascinated me since I first encountered them as a mechanism for automating a very fundamental method of discovering information.