Call for BIDS to Host ECIR 2006
Andrew MacFarlane <
andym@...>
2006-06-22 10:22:28 GMT
Dear Colleagues,
This is a call for bids to host the European Conference on Information
Retrieval Research in 2008 (ECIR 2008).
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 the
UK (even years) and continental Europe (odd years).
The BCS IRSG Committee is interested in hearing from bidders for
organizing ECIR 2008 in the UK. In 2007, ECIR is to be held in Rome in
April 2007. Recent ECIR events have been held in London in 2006, 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@... (and
copy to chair.irsg@...)
*** Deadline for ECIR 2008 proposals: end of day Thursday 31 August 2006
***
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://ecir2006.soi.city.ac.uk/ and
http://www-gsi.dec.usc.es/ecir05/
(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) 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 Ł1,500.
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/
-----------------------------------------------------------
! Dr. A. MacFarlane, Lecturer, Room A525, !
! Centre for Interactive Systems Research !
! Dept. Of Information Science, City University London !
! 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/ !
-----------------------------------------------------------
RSS Feed