Report on EARS'18
Yongfeng Zhang, Yi Zhang, Min Zhang · ACM SIGIR Forum · 2019
This is a report on the first edition of the International Workshop on ExplainAble Recommendation and Search (EARS 2018), co-located with the 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2018) held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA on July 8-12, 2018. The workshop was held on July 12, 2018, co-chaired by Yongfeng Zhang, Yi Zhang, and Min Zhang, with invited keynote speeches delivered by Prof. Paul Resnick from University of Michigan, and Dr. Qingsong Hua from Alibaba Inc. An invited panelist committee including Professors Matthew Lease, Paul Resnick, Mark Sanderson, Wlodek Zadrozny and Dr. Qingsong Hua made fruitful discussions about the past, present, and future on the research of explainable recommendation and search. The workshop accepted six contributed papers, and attracted over 80 registered participants. The scope of the workshop spans from technical approaches to explainable recommendation and search, to policy debates on the "principle of transparency" and the "right to explanation" of algorithmic decisions implied in recent EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other similar regulations such as The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018.