ACM RecSys Conference 2027 officially announced: August 23–27, Hawaii.

ACM RecSys 2027 will take place in Honolulu, Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi, from August 23–27, 2027, at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort (Google Maps). The news has just been announced by ACM RecSys on LinkedIn. RecSys 2027 will be the 21st ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. The three General Co-Chairs are Christine Bauer, Joeran Beel, and Bamshad Mobasher. There is a basic website already: https://recsys.acm.org/recsys27/ and an official logo (below).

A disclosure belongs near the top. I am writing this post on Recommender-Systems.com as one of the General Chairs of RecSys 2027. This is not an official ACM RecSys announcement. The official information is on the conference website and in the ACM RecSys communication channels. What follows is my personal perspective, plus some background from the organizing process. After working on this for quite a while, it is nice that this particular piece of information is no longer under embargo.

Hawaiʻi is an unusual location for RecSys, but perhaps less unusual than it first appears. Historically, RecSys has moved between North America, Europe, and, less frequently, Asia. There has never been a deterministic round-robin scheduler behind this. Still, there is a recognizable geographical pattern.

The first 20 editions illustrate this quite well. RecSys started in Minneapolis in 2007. It then went to Lausanne, New York, Barcelona, Chicago, Dublin, Hong Kong, Silicon Valley, Vienna, Boston, Como, Vancouver, and Copenhagen. After the online edition in 2020 came Amsterdam, Seattle, Singapore, Bari, Prague, and now Minneapolis again in 2026. Across the first 20 editions, nine conferences had European host cities, eight were in North America, two were in Asia, and one was online.

So the often-used shorthand that RecSys “rotates between the US, Europe, and Asia” is not entirely wrong, but it is also not literally true. In practice, the conference has alternated mostly between Europe and North America, with occasional Asian editions. Hong Kong hosted RecSys in 2013 and Singapore in 2023. Ten years apart.

The current sequence is also slightly distorted by the anniversary. RecSys 2024 was in Bari and RecSys 2025 in Prague, so Europe had two consecutive editions. RecSys 2026 then returns to Minneapolis. This is intentional. The 2026 conference is the twentieth RecSys, and Minneapolis is where the first RecSys took place in 2007. Returning there for the twentieth edition is a historical choice, not an attempt to optimize the geographical rotation.

That makes 2027 interesting. Formally, Hawaiʻi means another US conference directly after Minneapolis. If we classify by country, that looks a bit odd. If we classify by geography, it looks more reasonable. Honolulu sits in the central Pacific and can be seen as a compromise between North America and Asia. It remains a US destination, while being substantially closer to large parts of the Asia-Pacific region than Minneapolis, Boston, or New York.

I would not overstate that argument. Hawaiʻi is not Asia. For European researchers, it is also a very long trip. Travel cost, travel time, and environmental impact are obvious concerns. But after only two Asian RecSys editions in the first 20 conferences, I think a Pacific location is an interesting experiment. It may change the attendee distribution in ways that a conventional US location would not.

RecSys is also far from the first computer science conference to use Hawaiʻi. UMAP 2010, a conference with obvious overlap in user modelling and personalization, was held in Kona on the Big Island. ACM CIKM 2012 took place on Maui. UbiComp and ISWC met on Maui in 2017. AAAI-19 was held in Honolulu in 2019, and particularly relevant for us, it used the same Hilton Hawaiian Village that will host RecSys 2027.

More recently, Hawaiʻi has hosted several very large conferences in adjacent fields. CVPR 2017 took place in Honolulu. ICML 2023 was held at the Hawaiʻi Convention Center, followed by CHI 2024 and ICCV 2025. HICSS has, of course, been bringing information-systems and computing researchers to the islands for decades. So RecSys 2027 is the first RecSys in Hawaiʻi, but the location is not untested for technical conferences. There is already a substantial local infrastructure for events in AI, machine learning, HCI, computer vision, and information systems.

The second unusual aspect is the date. RecSys 2027 will take place from August 23–27. This is considerably earlier than the September or October slot that most of us associate with RecSys. There is no deeper scheduling strategy behind this. The explanation is much more operational.

We originally had another venue lined up for a fairly normal RecSys time frame. Planning had progressed, and from our perspective the venue looked settled. However, before the contract was finally signed, the venue informed us that it had rented the space to somebody else. At that point, our feasible solution space changed rather abruptly. We had to search again.

The combination that worked was the Hilton Hawaiian Village and August 23–27. So the early date should not be interpreted as a policy change for future RecSys conferences. It is the result of venue availability. Conference organization sometimes looks less like long-term scientific planning and more like constraint satisfaction with adversarial updates to the input data.

The outcome, however, is quite good. The Hilton Hawaiian Village is a large beachfront resort in Waikīkī with substantial conference infrastructure. More importantly, attendees will not be confined to the hotel. The resort itself has numerous restaurants, cafés, bars, grab-and-go options, and coffee shops. That matters more than one might think. A technical conference has at least two critical infrastructures: Wi-Fi and caffeine.

The surrounding area is also useful from a conference perspective. Waikīkī has a dense concentration of restaurants, coffee shops, hotels, convenience stores, and other services. There are many alternative hotels within walking distance or a short ride from the conference venue. This gives attendees options across different price ranges and avoids making the official conference hotel the only practical choice.

I consider that important. A conference is not just the sum of its accepted papers and scheduled sessions. A large fraction of the useful information exchange happens in less structured settings: over coffee, at dinner, while walking between hotels, or during the inevitable discussion that starts with “I have one small question about your evaluation protocol” and ends 45 minutes later. A walkable area with many restaurants and cafés is therefore not merely a tourism feature. It affects the interaction structure of the conference.

Christine Bauer, Bamshad Mobasher, and I will serve as General Chairs. I am very much looking forward to organizing RecSys 2027 with them. But this also means that readers should interpret this post accordingly. I am not a neutral observer assessing somebody else’s venue choice. I was part of the process. I think we ended up with a strong location, but there are also clear drawbacks.

Hawaiʻi will be expensive for some attendees. August may collide with summer holidays, school holidays, or the start of the academic year. For many Europeans, the travel distance is substantial. These are real issues, and a photo of Waikīkī Beach does not make them disappear. At the same time, Honolulu gives RecSys access to a different geographical position than its usual European and continental-US venues, and there is already a strong track record of adjacent research communities meeting successfully in Hawaiʻi.

For now, the operational message is simple: put August 23–27, 2027 into your calendar. Do not assume the usual late-September RecSys schedule. And if you need to justify a few additional days on Oʻahu before or after the conference, I am sure we can formulate a sufficiently rigorous research rationale.

First, however, there is RecSys 2026 and the twentieth anniversary in Minneapolis. See you there. And then, one year later, Christine, Bamshad, and I hope to see many of you in Honolulu.