The Third Workshop on the Normative Design and Evaluation of Recommender Systems (NORMalize) will be co-located with the 19th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems in Prague, Czech Republic. NORMalize is a hybrid half-day workshop taking place during the conference period, September 22–26, 2025. The exact date for the workshop is to be announced.

Objectives

NORMalize sets out to provide a platform for researchers and practitioners from different domains to discuss challenges related to the normative design and evaluation of recommender systems.

Recommender systems are used in many different domains, from recommending recipes to song playlists. They increasingly act as "gatekeepers" to what users are exposed to online. Therefore it is important that we, as designers of these systems, think about the norms and values appropriate to the domain when designing and evaluating these recommender systems, such that they have a positive impact on society. 

• Should recipe recommenders prioritize healthy choices over not so healthy choices? Or should they prioritize sustainability and recommend recipes that make use of local, fresh ingredients? Or maybe we need both?

• Should news recommenders provide sufficiently diverse recommendations? Should we strive to expose users to content that contradicts their political beliefs?

• How can we operationalize these norms and values in recommender systems?

• How can we design normative recommender systems?

• How can we evaluate recommender systems according to our norms and values? 

At NORMalize, we aim to provide some preliminary answers to the above questions, and many more through guided discussions that bring together industry and academia and scholars from different research domains.

Contact

normalizeworkshop@gmail.com