Efficiently using contextual influence to recommend new items to ephemeral groups

Group recommender systems suggest items to groups of users that want to utilize those items together. These systems can support several activities that can be performed together with other people and are typically social, like watching TV or going to the restaurant. In this paper we study ephemeral groups, i.e., groups constituted by users who are together for the first time, and for which therefore there is no history of past group activities.