Reminder: European Conference on IR Research - Call for bids to host ECIR2007
Andrew MacFarlane <
andym@...>
2005-06-20 11:49:02 GMT
** Deadline: Monday 27th June 2005 **
Dear Colleagues,
This is a call for bids to host the European Conference on Information
Retrieval Research in 2007 (ECIR 2007).
The BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) has been sponsoring
a successful annual conference for young researchers in Information
Retrieval for over 25 years. It used to be a solely British event,
steered by the Group, but has in recent years been held alternately in
Britain (even years) and continental Europe (odd years).
The BCS IRSG Committee is interested in hearing from bidders for
organizing ECIR 2007 in continental Europe. The next ECIR is to be held
in London, UK, in March/April 2006. Recent ECIR events have been held in
Santiago de Compostela, Spain in 2005; Sunderland, UK in 2004; Pisa, Italy
in 2003; and Glasgow, UK, in 2002.
Interested parties should submit their proposal by post (address below) or
email to the IRSG Secretary, Andy MacFarlane andym@...
<mailto:andym@...> (and copy to chair.irsg@...
<mailto:chair.irsg@...> )
*** Deadline for ECIR 2007 proposals: end of day Monday 27 June 2005 ***
The following text provides a guide to the content of the proposal.
_________________________________
(1) Location, venue, timing and social events
LOCATION: The location should be relatively easily accessible for people
attending from across Europe and elsewhere. Good air, rail and road links
are essential.
The bid should include a short description of the locality and any
remarkable or outstanding features that would make it particularly
attractive for potential delegates.
Conference Venue: Proposers should demonstrate that their host institution
has appropriate conference facilities to be able to accommodate up to 150
delegates. There should be smaller rooms for poster presentations and
break out areas. An adjacent area for coffee breaks and a separate dining
area nearby are also desirable.
Accommodation for Delegates: Proposers should demonstrate that they have
suitable accommodation for delegates (e.g. en-suite rooms in student halls
and/or local hotels), for a meeting of normally three days duration. The
BCS IRSG Committee is keen to encourage the participation of students and
new researchers in information retrieval (IR) to the Conference. Thus
potential hosts must also demonstrate access to low budget accommodation,
such as youth hostels or inexpensive student halls.
Timing: Traditionally, ECIR is held in the Spring, near to the Easter
weekend. It is also important that the timing does not conflict with
other important meetings. In particular, proposers should check to make
sure that the proposed dates for the conference do not clash with other
major information retrieval events.
Social Events: A range of social events has become a common feature of
ECIR, including a more formal Conference Dinner. Proposers should include
suggestions on a range of such events - with various price options - for
consideration and approval (e.g. discos, sightseeing visits, unusual
venues for evening meals). The cost of these activities should be
reasonable and should not unduly affect the overall conference fee. It is
often possible to arrange drink receptions and such like using corporate
sponsorships.
(2) Conference Web Site Proposers are expected to set up, organize and
maintain a web site for the conference, providing all necessary
information for contributors and potential delegates. Responsibility for
obtaining an appropriate domain name rests with the host.
For information, the conference web sites for the current and previous
ECIR events are: http://www-gsi.dec.usc.es/ecir05/
<http://www-gsi.dec.usc.es/ecir05/> and http://ecir04.sunderland.ac.uk/
<http://ecir04.sunderland.ac.uk/> .
(3) Track record of proposers Normally we would expect proposers to have
some prior experience of organizing conferences or other major events,
although these do not have to be connected with information retrieval.
Evidence of such activity should be provided. However, new organisers
should not be put off by this stipulation.
In addition, it is normally expected that proposers should have some
connection with the BCS IRSG or have attended previous IRSG events,
including ECIR. Continuity is important for ECIR; an institution that has
had no one at previous conferences is at a major disadvantage.
(4) Budget preparation and costings Proposers must produce a budget for
the conference. Costs should be estimated on 100 attendees, inclusive of
organizers and volunteer helpers. It is expected that the conference
should, at the least, break even; and should never run at a loss.
Various projections of income and expenditure, with different price bands
for members of BCS, IRSG and co-sponsoring bodies (normally a 10% discount
on the standard rate), non members and student delegates, with
corresponding break even points, should be provided. Registration fees
for students should be kept as low as possible in order to encourage young
researchers to participate. Incentives for early registration is
advisable.
(5) Sponsorship The Group's conferences have been fortunate in the past to
obtain various amounts of sponsorship, usually to enable students and
young researchers to attend at a subsidized rate. Sponsors have included
a variety of organizations, publishers and other corporate bodies.
CEPIS (Council of European Professional Informatics Societies,
http://www.cepis.org <http://www.cepis.org> ) has been a regular supporter
of the IRSG conferences. As a nonprofit organization, CEPIS provides its
sponsorship on a profit sharing model. Whilst it does not expect a full
reimbursement, CEPIS would expect a proportion of any surplus obtained
(see below).
The BCS IRSG Committee will work closely with the successful proposers to
negotiate with CEPIS, to maintain established links and to seek new
sponsorship as needed.
(6) Profit sharing model and underwriting by IRSG In the event that the
conference should result in a loss, BCS IRSG will underwrite 50% up to the
value of #1,500.
A cut-off date should be in place whereby if, by that date, either the
host institution or BCS IRSG Committee did not feel that either enough
submissions or registrations had been received, then the conference would
be cancelled. This was to ensure that the loss to the host institution
and the Group would be minimal.
In the event of a profit, then 40% may be retained by the host
institution, and 60% should be given to BCS IRSG. It should be noted that
previous hosts have typically donated any profit in its entirety back to
the Group.
If CEPIS provide sponsorship to the conference, then the BCS IRSG will
donate a proportion of its profit-share back to CEPIS (currently half of
its share).
(7) Support from host institution A letter of support from a proposers'
host institution should accompany the bid.
Promotion, publicity and schedule of activities Proposers should provide a
draft programme for the conference; a schedule of activities, indicating
key dates; and their plans for publicizing the conference.
(8) Call for Papers A draft call for papers with envisaged deadlines
should be appended. Typically, topics of interest include, but are not
limited to, the following areas:
IR models, techniques, and algorithms
Searching, browsing, meta-searching, data fusion, filtering, and
indexing
Text and content classification, mining, extraction, and
summarisation
Topic detection, and tracking
Personalised, collaborative, recommender, user-adaptive IR
Improvements on existing and new IR models
Compression, performance, optimisation
Users, society, and IR
User modelling, user studies, user interaction in IR systems
Novel user interfaces for IR systems
Visualisation and presentation of queries, search results, and
content
Information management
Cross-language and multi-language IR
IR applications
Web IR
Mobile and ubiquitous IR
Digital libraries
IR system architectures
Distributed
Parallel
Mobile
Multimodal
Open, interoperable, and flexible
Content representation, and processing
IR and structured content e.g. XML based
Unstructured content
Meta information and structures
Test and evaluation methods for IR systems
Test collections and bench marking
User-oriented and user-centred test and evaluation
Multimedia and cross-media IR
Speech and IR
Image and video IR
Digital music, radio, and TV
All papers and posters are to be refereed through a blind peer review.
Accepted papers and poster abstracts are normally published in the Lecture
Notes in Computer Science series. The proceedings should be distributed to
all delegates at the Conference.
Submissions must be in English, which is the official language of the
conference.
(9) Conference Programme Committee Proposers should specify arrangements
for the Conference Programme Committee's operation, anonymous reviewing
process, and the mechanism for producing a final list of accepted papers,
including whether or not a face-to-face programme committee will be
organized, or some other means of resolving reviewing conflicts and
moderating reviewing scores.
It is also expected that the Programme Committee should liaise with the
BCS IRSG Committee to ensure general consistency in approach and
procedures from year to year, in accordance with the overall vision of the
ECIR conferences.
(10) BCS IRSG Annual General Meeting As ECIR represents the premier annual
meeting of Group members, it is essential that a timeslot for the Annual
General Meeting of the Group be built into the programme, and scheduled at
a convenient time to encourage all members to attend. Based on past
experience, an hour should be an adequate amount of time for this.
______________________________________
The BCS IRSG Committee will evaluate all bids using the guidelines
presented above. In addition, the Committee will also assess the
professionalism of the bid documentation and the proposers' compliance
with IRSG/ECIR philosophy and vision.
The BCS IRSG Committee may wish to discuss aspects of the bid with the
proposers prior to making a decision on the winner.
Anyone interested in bidding is welcome to talk informally with the Chair
prior to the deadline date for proposals. Any such discussion will be
reported back to the full Committee.
The IRSG Committee will normally meet to review proposals and make its
decision within six weeks of the submission date. BCS IRSG Committee
members whose institutions are among the candidates will not participate
in the decision making process.
Andy MacFarlane
Secretary andym@...
On behalf of the Chair, BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group
chair.irsg@...
http://irsg.bcs.org/
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!Dr. A. MacFarlane, Lecturer, Centre for !
!Interactive Systems Research, Dept. Of !
!Information Science, Room A218c, College!
!Building, City University, Northampton !
!Square, LONDON EC1V 0HB, Tel: +44 (0)20 !
!7040 8386, Fax: +44 (0)20 7040 8584 !
!URL: http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~andym/ !
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