Aina Errando (imec-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and Juliette Parmentier (ReSIC and NADI), both part of the ALGEPI project, attended the ACM Europe School on Recommender Systems in Vienna, hosted by the CD RecSys Lab at TU Wien from the 15th to the 19th of September.

The program brought together early-career researchers, senior scholars, and industry professionals working on recommender systems, offering a week of lectures on topics such as group and conversational recommender systems, fairness and social impact, and recommender systems for a fair and sustainable future. Besides the technical lectures on the design, implementation and evaluation of recommender systems, researchers could also engage in conversations on the ethics of AI as well as its political and humanist foundations.

As part of a gamification activity during the summer school, Aina and Juliette were challenged to design a recommender system aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), encouraging participants to think critically about the societal impact and ethical dimensions of recommendation technologies.