The All-Time GroupLens Reunion

In late September, we held the first all-time GroupLens reunion!

Current and former students, faculty, staff, and visitors from across four decades gathered to celebrate several anniversaries that landed on this year: the first anniversary of the new GroupLens Lab in Shepherd Hall, the 30th anniversary of the founding of Net Perceptions, and the 20th RecSys Conference.

During the anniversary in the new labspace, we introduced the current faculty, students, and staff, before doing introductions and updates from alumni. After lunch, we did a tour of the labspace, followed by alumni panels where we heard about the career journeys of alumni (with one of the panels starring alumni associated with Net Perceptions) along with a special announcement, followed by dinner.

The special announcement was about the new John T. Riedl Fellowship for Interactive Intelligent Systems, created through the generosity of GroupLens alumni to honor the late Riedl’s commitment to teaching and research. Riedl was one of the founding members of GroupLens and left an impact on many of those attending the reunion. Lana was the recipient of the inaugural fellowship as they are dedicated to fostering research and education, with a strong emphasis on supporting undergraduate students in research. Congrats Lana!

It was a great day, and we look forward to future reunions and connections among our GroupLens community. Scroll down to see some of the pictures we took at the anniversary, displaying GroupLensers across the decades (photo credit: https://stellarfieldanomaly.neocities.org/).