The first workshop on user engagement optimization

Abstract

Online user engagement optimization is key to many Internet business. Several research areas are related to the concept of online user engagement optimization, including machine learning, data mining, information retrieval, recommender systems, online A/B (bucket) testing and psychology. In the past, research efforts in this direction are pursued in separate communities and conferences, yielding potential disconnected and repeated results. In addition, researchers and practitioners are sometimes only exposed to a specific aspect of the topic, which might be incomplete and suboptimal to the whole picture. Here, we organize the first workshop on the topic of online user engagement optimization, explicitly targeting the topic as a whole and bring researchers and practitioners together to foster the field. We invite two leading researchers from industry to give keynote talks about online machine learning and online experimentations. In addition, several invited talks from industry and academic researchers have covered the topics of content personalization, online experimental platforms and recommender systems. Also, six novel submissions are included as short papers in the workshop such that new results are discussed and shared among the workshop.