We invite the submission of short research papers to the Second International Workshop on Decentralized Search and Recommendation (DESERE 2025), to be held in conjunction with CIKM 2025 at Seoul, Korea on 14 November 2025. Building on the success of the inaugural DESERE workshop at The Web Conference 2024, this edition continues to advance the discourse on decentralized information access, with a particular focus on privacy-preserving infrastructures and retrieval algorithms for user-controlled data.

As data ecosystems shift toward decentralization, traditional paradigms in search and recommendation face new challenges. The rise of infrastructures such as Personal Online Datastores (PODs), federated learning frameworks, and semantic interoperability standards demands a rethinking of how information is accessed, managed, and recommended—placing user agency, privacy, and data ownership at the core.

DESERE 2025 provides a platform for researchers and practitioners from information retrieval, recommender systems, data management, semantic web, privacy-aware AI, and distributed systems to present and discuss their latest findings, innovative solutions, and emerging use cases. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that address theoretical foundations, system design, algorithmic advances, and real-world deployments of decentralized systems. Application areas may include, but are not limited to, domains where user agency, data privacy, and trustworthy information access are critical.

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome:

• short papers presenting either complete results and insights or reporting on ongoing work and preliminary findings.

 Submission Information

Submitted papers must follow the CIKM guidelines for submissions (https://cikm2025.org/calls/workshops).

Note that the paper acceptance notification deadline should remain September 30 (or earlier), so authors of accepted papers still have at least a week to take advantage of Early-Bird Registration fees. Workshop papers will not be included in the ACM proceedings. Any decision on whether and where proceedings are to be archived is left to the organizers. To help preserve the authors’ ability to submit a revised version of their paper to a conference or journal, joining the volume is suggested to be left at the discretion of the authors. At least one author of each accepted paper must register to present the work on-site in Seoul, Korea, as scheduled in the conference program.

Paper submissions must conform to the “double-blind” review policy. All papers will be peer-reviewed by experts in the field. Acceptance will be based on relevance to the workshop, scientific novelty, and technical quality. Manuscripts should be submitted to the (TBC) site in PDF format, using the ACM sigconf template, see https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. Submissions should be in 2-column sigconf format. Short papers cannot exceed 4 pages, including an appendix, plus unlimited pages for the GenAI Usage Disclosure section and references (paper content is limited to 4 pages, which means that if you have an appendix, then it should be included within that page limit. It is also ok if you do not have an appendix and instead 4 pages of content).

Important dates 

• Paper submission deadline: August 31, 2025
• Notification to authors: September 30, 2025 
• Camera-ready deadline: October 20, 2025 
• Workshop date: November 14, 2025

List of Topics

We invite original short research papers on topics including (but not limited to):

• Decentralized infrastructures for information retrieval and recommendation
• Privacy-preserving algorithms and federated learning in decentralized settings
• Retrieval models and ranking algorithms for distributed data sources
• Semantic interoperability in decentralized systems
• Access control, consent management, and transparency mechanisms for user data
• Personal Online Datastores (e.g., Solid, Dataspaces) and related architectures
• Standards and protocols for decentralized data integration and exchange
• Personalization, user modeling, and contextual relevance in decentralized environments
• Evaluation methodologies and benchmarks for decentralized IR and recommendation systems
• User modeling and personalization in decentralized environments

Committees

Program Committee

• Adriane Chapman, University of Southampton 

• Ruben Taelman, Ghent University

• Helen Oliver, Birkbeck, University of London 

• Alexandra Poulovassilis, Birkbeck, University of London 

• George Roussos, Birkbeck, University of London 

• Thanassis Tiropanis, University of Southampton 

Organizing committee

• Thanassis Tiropanis, University of Southampton 

• George Roussos, Birkbeck, University of London 

• Mohamed Bahrani, University of Southampton – Co-Chair 

• Mohamed Ragab, City University of Birmingham – Co-Chair 

Invited Speakers

• Prof. Jie Tang (University of Southampton)
• Speaker 2 (TBC)

Contact

mohamed.ragab@soton.ac.uk & M.Bahrani@soton.ac.uk