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Iadh Ounis | 13 Oct 2006 12:13
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Openings in information retrieval/semantic technologies

Initial applications are invited for two positions at the Department of
Computing Science of the University of Glasgow, for the EPSRC funded project:

Explicator: Intelligent access to foreign data models The Virtual
Observatory (VO) project within astronomy has two core problems: how to find
data from scattered, and often under-resourced, archives, and once it is
found how to make use of it, given that different archives will generally
have significantly different models of how their data is structured.  The
High-Energy Physics (HEP) community doesn't really have the first problem --
there are rather fewer important accelerators and detectors, and so fewer
data sources -- but does have the second, since different facilities have
different, and necessarily inflexible, ideas about how to structure the data
they produce.

An obvious approach is to define a consensus model, but this often falls
victim to the usual social problems of standardisation.  This project aims
for a radically different peer-to-peer approach, making it possible for
software to extract the information it needs from a network of explanations.
 This approach recognises that partial and indirect understanding of a
dataset's structure can, in important cases, be enough for the software to
do its work.

This approach builds on both well-established Artificial Intelligence (AI)
and Knowledge Engineering (KE) work, as well as on the emerging technologies
from the Semantic Web community.  It separately builds on work from the
Information Retrieval (IR) community on how to work with distributed,
heterogeneous and uncertain data. The work will extend the successful
TERRIER information retrieval platform (http://ir.dcs.gla.ac.uk/terrier) and
its corresponding tools, developed at the University of Glasgow, with
semantic web tools and techniques.
(Continue reading)

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Lindsay, John M | 17 Oct 2006 11:52
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FW: [KIDMM] "Knowledge Communities" idea to be broached at BCS Specialist Groups Assembly

don't know who on this list knows about any of this: I have seen nothing from the irsg committee and don't know how the sg is being involved in the process.  If anyone has anything to add,or comment, please let us know
 
for those who don't know about the KIDMM group, igt too is a jiscmail list and the material may be found in the same place as the ir stuff

From: BCS Knowledge, Information and Metadata Management on behalf of Conrad Taylor
Sent: Tue 17/10/2006 09:51
To: BCS-KIDMM-fDUS8cNZx2jrfANEuwkQdg@public.gmane.org
Subject: [KIDMM] "Knowledge Communities" idea to be broached at BCS Specialist Groups Assembly

Tomorrow there will be held in London the Specialist
Groups Assembly of the British Computer Society.  My
guess is that most of you will not have heard about
it, and in fact the Specialist Groups representatives
themselves only had the agenda revealed to them at
short notice.

It'll be an unusual Assembly, because the agenda is
constructed around discussions on "a proposed synergy
between SGs and Forum Strategic Panels".  A discussion
paper has just been mailed out to delegates, over the
names of Howard Gerlis, Glyn Hayes, Ian Herbert, Tony
Jenkins, Alan Pollard, Mike Rodd and Lynne Sturgess.

The discussion paper is said to be the fruit of the
SG Executive Synergy Working Party, of the existence
of which I knew nothing.

Suddenly, on page three of the paper, a new kind of
animal is paraded into the circus ring: Knowledge
Communities.

   "Together, SGs and Forum SPs can form flexible
    Knowledge Communities, which may well overlap.
    Indeed, there may also be the need to include
    other groups and working parties.  Most SGs
    relate naturally to one or more of the existing
    areas of expertise (Management, Health, Engineering
    and Technology, Women, Ethics, Education and
    Security) but for others, it may be appropriate
    to create new Communities in the future e.g. Media,
    Knowledge, Information and Data Management, Systems
    Engineering etc.  There needs to be flexibility
    and inclusivity to encourage synergy; only then
    can the benefits be felt by the SGs and Forum SPs
    within the Knowledge Communities, BCS as a whole
    and the wider community.

   "Initially, we suggest that two advisory groups,
    one for SGs and the other for Forum SPs, can work
    together as one united Knowledge Communities Board
    where close links between the two areas will enable
    synergy and develop the communities.  This will ensure
    the understanding and awareness of SG activities and
    requirements and, at the same time, build on BCS
    strategy and focus."

Hmm, not sure yet what to make of this.  Interesting that
the initial proposal is to set up two committees and a Board
to manage and regulate Knowledge Communities before we know
what they will be.  Is the idea, through KCs, to do from the
top down what we in KIDMM have been trying to do from the
bottom up?

Notice well this: "it may be appropriate to create new
Communities in the future e.g. ... Knowledge, Information
and Data Management..."

I kind of thought we were already in the process of creating
a knowledge community, though not with a big K and a big C.

Reactions, anyone?  Anybody got more insight
into where this idea has come from?

Conrad



--
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Conrad Taylor:  Information design & electronic publishing
Chairperson, BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group (www.epsg.org.uk)

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Giambattista Amati | 23 Oct 2006 09:57
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3rd CfP ECIR 2007, 2-5 April 2007 (full paper deadline: 30th October)

** Apologies for multiple postings **

3rd Call for Papers (full paper submission deadline: 30 October, 2006)

ECIR 2007
29th European Conference on Information Retrieval
Rome, April 2-5, 2007
Organized by the Fondazione Ugo Bordoni and BCS-IRSG, in cooperation with ACM SIGIR.
http://ecir2007.fub.it/

The Program Chairs invite for the submission of original research papers and posters in all areas 
of Information Retrieval, including but not limited to:

- Theory and Models for Information Retrieval.
- Efficiency and Performance of IR. Platforms, Architectures and Applications of IR.
- Evaluation and Test collections.
- Indexing. Query representation, Query reformulation, Structure-based representation, XML, 
Metadata. Summarization. Natural language processing for IR.
- Tracking, Filtering, Topic detection, Collaborative filtering, Agents, Routing and Email spam.
- Categorization and clustering.
- User studies and interfaces. Interactive IR. Task-based IR.
- Web IR, Distributed IR, Digital libraries. Intranet, Desktop, Enterprise and Blog Search. 
Adversarial IR.
- Question answering and information extraction. Text Data Mining and Machine Learning for IR.
- Multimedia IR.
- Cross-language and multilingual Information Retrieval.

*Best Paper Award*
An award will be given to the best paper submitted to the conference. 

*Best Student Paper Award*
An award will be given to the best paper whose main author is a PhD or postdoctoral student. 

*Important Dates*
Submission deadline for papers: 30 October, 2006
Submission deadline for posters: 6 November, 2006
Review submission by referees: 4 December, 2006
Notification to authors: 13 December, 2006
Conference: Rome, April 2-5, 2007

*Proceedings*
The ECIR 2007 Proceedings (including full papers and posters) will be published in the Springer 
LNCS Series.

*Submission Instructions*
Papers should be formatted according to LNCS guidelines and submitted electronically through the 
conference web site.
Full length papers must not exceed 12 pages, including references and figures. Papers submitted 
to the poster track must not exceed 4 formatted pages. Overlength papers will not be accepted for 
review. 

Gianni Amati, Claudio Carpineto, and Gianni Romano
Chairs of ECIR 2007
http://ecir2007.fub.it/
ecir2007chair@...
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Mark Sanderson | 26 Oct 2006 08:21
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Call for Papers: Special issue on Adversarial Issues in Web Search

===========================================================================
Call for Papers: Special issue on Adversarial Issues in Web Search
ACM Transactions on the Web ( http://www.acm.org/tweb/)
===========================================================================


We are soliciting papers for a special issue of the ACM Transactions
on the Web (ACM TWEB) devoted to adversarial issues in web search.

Over the past decade, web search engines have become the predominant
tool for web users to locate information, and they have grown to be
cornerstones of the web economy, by driving traffic to commercial web
sites and by creating web advertising platforms.  The economic potential
of search engines has given rise to adversaries that are trying to profit
from search engines either by influencing search results or by redirecting
advertisement revenue streams.

The attraction of hundreds of millions of web searches per day provides
significant incentive for many content providers to do whatever is
necessary to rank highly in search engine results, while search engine
providers want to provide the most accurate results.  The conflicting
goals of search and content providers is adversarial, and the use of
techniques that push rankings higher than they belong is often called
search engine spam.  Such methods typically include textual as well as
link-based techniques, or their combination.

Search engines also face another form of adversarial behavior
colloquially known as click fraud.  Most of the major search engines
use an advertisement-based revenue model, where they present users
with advertisements tailored to their queries.  When a user clicks on
an advertisement, the search engines collects a fee from the advertiser. 
This opens the doors for adversarial players to deplete the funds of a
competitor by generating a fraudulent click stream to the competitor's
advertisements.  A variant of this scheme exploits the fact that the
major search engines operate advertisement networks, where they display
advertisements on partner web sites and share ad revenue with these
partners.  A dishonest partner can profit illegitimately by generating a
click stream to ads displayed on his site. This is straightforward to
detect if the clicks originate from a single computer, but much harder
to detect if the attack is distributed (e.g. via a "zombie farm" of
co-opted computers).

Particular areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

   - search engine spam and optimization,
   - comment spam, referrer spam,
   - blog spam (splogs),
   - cloaking,
   - crawling the web without detection,
   - link-bombing (a.k.a. Google-bombing),
   - malicious tagging,
   - reverse engineering of ranking algorithms, and
   - click fraud.

Papers addressing higher-level concerns (e.g., whether 'open' algorithms
can succeed in an adversarial environment, whether permanent solutions
are possible, etc.) are also welcome.

Content and formatting guidelines as well as information on the ACM TWEB
review process can be found online at  http://www.acm.org/tweb/author.html.
When submitting your paper, please mention that it is to be considered for the
special issue on Adversarial Issues in Web Search.



IMPORTANT DATES

  30 March 2007       Deadline for submissions
  18 June 2007        Notification of acceptance
  31 August 2007      Deadline for revisions (if needed)
  28 September 2007   Camera-ready copy due
  4th quarter 2007    Publication of special issue


GUEST EDITORS

  Tim Converse, Yahoo! Search
  Brian D. Davison, Lehigh University
  Marc Najork, Microsoft Research



NTCIR Evaluation workshop http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/ntcir-ws6/pmw-en.html

 ____________________________________________________________________
Mark Sanderson, Room 225               Tel: +44 (0) 114 22 22648
Department of Information Studies      Fax: +44 (0) 114 27 80300
University of Sheffield, Regent Court, mailto:m.sanderson-3Ch7lUbXYW61Qrn1Bg8BZw@public.gmane.org
Portobello St, Sheffield, S1 4DP, UK   http://dis.shef.ac.uk/mark/
 ____________________________________________________________________
Good judgement is from experience, experience is from bad judgement
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Fabio Crestani | 26 Oct 2006 13:38
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Open positions at USI

Dear all,

Please find attached a call for open positions at the University of  
Lugano in Switzerland. I highly recommend the place!

Please fill free to contact me for additional information.

Best,

Fabio
Attachment (Call for applications.pdf): application/pdf, 72 KiB
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Prof. Fabio Crestani                             tel: +44 141 548 4303
Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences       fax: +44 141 548 4523
University of Strathclyde          email:  F.Crestani@...
Glasgow G1 1XH, Scotland, UK       http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/~fabioc
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