Call for Opinions - AltRecSys 2026 Workshop at RecSys

Dear colleagues,

We are excited to announce our Call for Opinions for the second AltRecSys Workshop on Alternative, Unexpected, and Critical Ideas in Recommendation, held with RecSys 2026 in Minneapolis, MN.

As ACM RecSys turns 20, AltRecSys 2026 asks what the field’s success, scale, and institutionalization may have pushed out of view. This workshop creates space for offbeat, critical, and unconventional work that questions dominant assumptions and unsettles familiar narratives in recommender systems research and practice. Together, we ask: What have we not been looking at? And where might the field go if we dared to look there now?

Full details are available at https://altrecsys.github.io/recsys26/.


To guide this second edition, we explicitly center the workshop around three guiding questions:

  *   What vital questions, structural blind spots, or long‑term opportunities has the RecSys community overlooked over the past 20 years?
  *   Which emerging or neglected use cases, methodological paradigms, or evaluation practices challenge our standard ways of doing RecSys research, and how might embracing them reshape the field’s future directions?
  *   What assumptions have constrained the development of the recommendation community and/or technology, and what might alternate paths look like?

Fitting contributions to this workshop include, but are not limited to:

  *   Interesting and/or provocative ideas that question dominant framings of recommendation, personalization, utility, or system goals, and that are too preliminary or unconventional for a traditional research paper.
  *   Lessons learned from negative results, failed experiments, or abandoned research directions that surface structural limitations or blind spots in RecSys research or practice.
  *   Perspectives that document and critically examine foundational assumptions that have shaped recommender systems research over the past two decades.
  *   Methods‑only research descriptions intended to provoke discussion around alternative research designs, interdisciplinary approaches, or evaluation practices before results are known.
  *   Explorations of neglected or emerging use cases, stakeholder relationships, or sociotechnical contexts that challenge established notions of users, creators, platforms, or success metrics.

To lower barriers to participation and encourage creativity, we invite contributions in multiple formats, which can be submitted via this submission form<https://forms.gle/tckEbiKY4KUEBv2L9>:

  *   Extended abstracts of up to 500 words describing the opinion, perspective, or idea.
  *   Short videos of up to 3 minutes.
  *   Podcasts of up to 20 minutes.
  *   Panel, where you propose up to 3 panelists and a theme.
  *   Other creative or unconventional formats aligned with the spirit of the workshop

All submissions will be editorially reviewed by the workshop organizers, who will curate a set of contributions aimed at fostering critical reflection, constructive discomfort, and forward‑looking dialogue, rather than polished technical results. Curation will ultimately focus on identifying a small set of contributions that collectively stimulate diverse, vibrant discussion during the workshop.

This will be a highly interactive workshop. Accepted contributions will be shared on the workshop website and distributed to participants in advance of the event to seed deeper, more engaged discussions during the workshop.

Submissions are due July 20.

--
Michael D. Ekstrand, Ph.D (he/him) — https://md.ekstrandom.net
Asst. Prof., Dept. of Information Science, Drexel University
I may send e-mail outside of business hours; I do not expect you to.

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