Organizers
Thomas E. Kolb
Co-Chair, TU Wien, CDL-RecSys
Thomas E. Kolb is a 3rd year PhD student and project assistant at TU Wien, specializing in the long-term dynamics of bias and fairness in cross-domain recommender systems. His research, conducted in collaboration with industry partners in the news, books, and lifestyle domains, explores the evolution of algorithmic bias over time and its implications for fairness. His work advances the understanding of fairness-aware recommendations, aiming to provide actionable insights for academia and industry.
Ashmi Banerjee
Co-Chair, TU Munich
Ashmi Banerjee is a 3rd year PhD student at the Technical University of Munich, focusing on Tourism Recommender Systems. She graduated with a master’s degree in Computer Science in 2019 and has three years of industry experience in Germany. A Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning since 2023, Ashmi was named one of the 100 technologists to watch for 2023 and has received multiple awards, including the Google Developer Expert Community Award and the Women Who Code Applaud Her Awards for 2023. As a Google Women Techmakers Ambassador and a diversity advocate, she is dedicated to closing the gender gap in STEM through her involvement in various women in STEM networks such as the ACM Women in RecSys.
Ahmadou Wagne
Co-Chair, TU Wien, CDL-RecSys
Ahmadou Wagne is a PhD student and project assistant at TU Wien, Austria. He holds a Master’s degree in Data Science from TU Wien. His research focuses on preference elicitation in conversational recommender systems, investigating the potential of LLMs in that process, especially in e-commerce. His research is dedicated to better understanding users’ preferences and facilitating their decision-making process. Beyond this, his academic interests extend to natural-language processing and computational social science.
Julia Neidhardt
Co-Chair, TU Wien, CDL-RecSys
Julia Neidhardt is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at TU Wien with a background in mathematics and computer science. Her research covers user modeling, recommender systems, social networks, and online behavior, with over 80 publications. She is a senior program committee member of ACM UMAP and ACM RecSys and associate editor of the Journal of Information Technology & Tourism. She has co-chaired research tracks at ACM UMAP 2023, ENTER e-Tourism 2020, and ENTER 2019 and co-organized various academic events.
Since 2022, she has led the Christian Doppler Laboratory on Recommender Systems at TU Wien, focusing on using LLMs to improve recommender systems. In 2023, she was appointed UNESCO Co-Chair of Digital Humanism at TU Wien, working on AI technologies’ responsible and ethical use.
Yashar Deldjoo
Co-Chair, Polytechnic University of Bari
Yashar Deldjoo is a tenure-track Assistant Professor and senior research scientist at the Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy. He serves as an associate editor for ACM CSUR and IEEE TKDE, and has guest-edited special issues on Trustworthy Recommender Systems and Recommendations with Generative Models for ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems. Yashar is a member of the senior program committees for conferences such as SIGIR, CIKM, ECAI, and WebConf. With over 100 publications, he has contributed two chapters to the Recommender Systems Handbook and authored a book on Recommendations with Generative Models (FntIR-2025).
