Recommender systems: Trends and frontiers

Recommender systems (RSs), as used by Netflix, YouTube, or Amazon, are one of the most compelling success stories of AI. Enduring research activity in this area has led to a continuous improvement of recommendation techniques over the years, and today's RSs are indeed often capable to make astonishingly good suggestions. With countless papers being published on the topic each year, one might think the recommendation problem is almost solved. In reality, however, the large majority of published works focuses on algorithmic improvements and relies on data-based evaluation procedures which may sometimes tell us little regarding the effects new algorithms will have in practice. This special issue contains a set of papers which address some of the open challenges and frontiers in RSs research: (i) building interactive and conversational solutions, (ii) understanding recommender systems as socio-technical systems with longitudinal dynamics, (iii) avoiding abstraction traps, and (iv) finding better ways of assessing the impact and value of recommender systems without field tests.