Call for Papers

Topics of Interest

HCRS is organized around three main topics that call for a paradigm shift—from optimizing engagement to creating systems that genuinely understand, empower, and respect humans:

Human Understanding—Systems that understand humans

Modeling user intents, cognition, and affect beyond surface interactions, moving beyond clicks toward multidimensional measures such as satisfaction and trust.

• Intent- and context-aware recommendation
• Cognitive and affective modeling
• LLM-based user modeling
• Human behavior uncertainty
• Beyond-click metrics: satisfaction, trust, emotion

Human Involvement—Humans in the loop

Enabling interactive, co-adaptive, and controllable systems that empower users to guide model updates, express preferences, and co-create content.

• Interactive and conversational recommendation
• Multi-turn and mixed-initiative interaction
• User feedback elicitation and controllable personalization
• Human–AI co-creation in content-generation scenarios
• User simulation for scalable and safe training and evaluation

Human Impact—Systems that affect humans and society

Addressing societal and ethical dimensions, including fairness, privacy, robustness, and transparency, while mitigating issues such as echo chambers and filter bubbles.

• Fairness and bias mitigation
• Diversity enhancement and echo chamber alleviation
• Privacy-preserving recommendation
• Robustness and security
• Transparency and accountability
• Evaluation, auditing, and governance frameworks
• Societal welfare and well-being-oriented optimization

Emerging Cross-Domain Topics

We also encourage submissions on emerging research directions that bridge disciplines:

• LLM-powered recommenders and human preference alignment
• Multi-objective optimization for social good, balancing privacy, diversity, and satisfaction
• Human-centered evaluation methodologies and user studies
• Recommender systems for education, healthcare, and other critical domains

Submission Guidelines

We invite submissions between 4 and 8 pages (excluding references) covering the above topics. Manuscripts will be reviewed by our program committee through a single-blind review process, meaning that authors' names do not need to be anonymized. Accepted submissions will be presented either as oral talks or posters during the workshop.

For unpublished work, authors have the option to include their accepted papers in the Companion Proceedings of the Web Conference 2026, provided they meet the camera-ready timeline.Previously published work is also welcome for submission to the workshop, but such work will not be included in the companion proceedings.

This policy encourages open discussions while respecting the integrity of prior and future publications.

Paper Format

All submissions must be in English and must adhere to the ACM template and format (also available in Overleaf), with the following options:

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• CCS class and keywords sections are optional.
• Papers must be between 4 and 8 pages in the ACM manuscript format (excluding references).
• Appendices are allowed but will not count toward the page limit. References and acknowledgements are excluded from the page count.

Submission

Papers should be submitted from Openreview.

Important Dates

• 2025-12-18: Paper submission deadline
• 2026-01-13: Author notification
• 2026-02-02: Camera-ready submission
• TBD: Workshop (half-day session)

All deadlines are 23:59 Anywhere On Earth (UTC-12)

We look forward to your contributions and to fostering discussions on creating ethical, user-friendly, and socially responsible recommender systems!