Call for Participation (deadline approaching): Summer School on Multimedia Semantics 2007

Karen Sparck Jones passes away

From: Jamie Callan [mailto:callan+@...]
Subject: Karen Sparck Jones

Karen Sparck Jones, a pioneer in automatic language processing and
information retrieval, has died of cancer.  Karen was a good friend to
many within the IR community, and a leader in the best sense of the
word.  She was known for a commitment
to excellence, support of junior researchers, and an influential and
productive research career that spanned six decades.  She was a Fellow
of the British Academy, the AAAI, and the ECAAI and received numerous
awards for her research, including in the last year two awards from ACM
(Athena Lecturer, ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award) and one from the BCS
(Lovelace Medal).  She was the second recipient of ACM SIGIR's Gerard
Salton Award.

For additional information about Karen's life and distinguished research
career, please see her web page (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ksj21/), and
the announcement of her death from Cambridge University
(http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2007040403).

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3rd CFP: DEXA-Workshop on Text-Based Information Retrieval, TIR-07

3rd CALL FOR PAPERS
========================================================================
"4th International Workshop on Text-Based Information Retrieval" (TIR-07)

A Workshop in conjunction with the
18th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications,
DEXA 2007,
Regensburg, Germany, September 3rd to 7th
http://www.aisearch.de/tir-07

ABOUT THIS WORKSHOP:

Intelligent technologies for information mining and retrieval have
become an important and exciting field of research in our
information-flooded society. Methods of text-based information
retrieval receive special attention, which results from the
fundamental role of written text, from the high availability of the
Internet, and from the rising importance of the different forms of Web
communities.

Various techniques and methods are being used for text-based
information retrieval tasks, which stem from different research areas:
machine learning, computer linguistics and psychology, user
interaction and modeling, information visualization, Web engineering,
or distributed systems. The development of powerful retrieval tools
requires the combination of these developments, and in this sense the
workshop shall provide a platform that spans different views and
approaches.

The following list gives examples from classic and ongoing topics from
the field of text-based information retrieval for which contributions
are welcome (but not restricted to):

 - formal models for text representation, document models, similarity
measures for special retrieval tasks
 - category formation and clustering, document classification
 - IR and natural language processing: topic identification, text
summarization, keyword extraction
 - Web community mining, social network analysis, collaborative tagging and IR
 - plagiarism analysis, author identification, style analysis
 - concepts and techniques for information visualization, user modeling, and
interaction for particular retrieval tasks
 - relevance feedback and personalization
 - evaluation, building of test collections, experimental design and user
studies
 - multilingual issues in IR: cross-language retrieval, multilingual
retrieval, machine translation for IR
 - IR for the Semantic Web: usage, extraction, and maintenance of knowledge
 - IR and software engineering: frameworks, architectures, distributed IR
 - IR in business and engineering applications

The workshop addresses researchers, users, and practitioners from
different fields: data mining and machine learning, document and
knowledge management, semantic technologies, computer linguistics, and
information retrieval in general. In particular, we encourage
potential participants to present research prototypes and tools of
their ideas.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Deadline for paper submission	  April 12, 2007
Notification to authors		  April 28, 2007
Camera-ready copy due		  May 31, 2007
Workshop opens			  September 3, 2007

Contributions will be peer-reviewed by at least two experts from the
related field. Accepted papers will be published as IEEE proceedings
by IEEE CS Press.

WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION:

Benno Stein, Bauhaus University Weimar
Harald Sack, Friedrich Schiller University Jena

Contact: benno.stein@...
Information about the workshop can be found at http://www.aisearch.de/tir-07

CfP - I-Know 07/TRIPLE-I - Extended Deadline due to 21.05.2007

			Call for Papers

 
	       	    TRIPLE-I
	The Innovations Conference for Knowledge Management, 
	  New Media Technology and Semantic Technologies

		    5 - 7 September 2007
			Graz, Austria
		http://www.triple-i.info

The TRIPLE-I Conference series is a joint venture of the conferences 
  I-KNOW - International Conference on Knowledge Management
  http://www.i-know.at

  I-MEDIA - International Conference on New Media Technology
  http://www.i-media.tugraz.at

  I-SEMANTICS - International Conference on Semantic Technology
  http://www.i-semantics.at 

TRIPLE-I reflects the increasing importance and convergence of knowledge
management, new media technologies and semantic technologies. This
unique concept aims at bridging the gaps between the various communities
and their technology fields. 

This lets participants of all three conferences benefit from the
synergies of these events, in particular from the presence  of a range
of different yet related perspectives at the same time and place.
I-KNOW, I-MEDIA and I-SEMANTICS will continue to take place in Graz, the
capital of Styria in the south of Austria. An interesting town to visit
the whole year round, Graz and its surroundings are particularly
rewarding in summer. The social events of the conference will give you a
first taste, but you just might want to plan on staying a little longer.

The upcoming event addresses representatives from academia, industry and
public administrations. TRIPLE-I will offer its participants a unique
platform either to present latest and leading edge developments or to
catch up with the developments of most innovative IT technologies,
content applications, business models and emerging market opportunities.

 
Submission
Triple-I invites the submission of original contributions from academic,
public and industrial/commercial sectors. The conference focus is on
application-oriented research with emphasis on information technologies
for knowledge management and new management tools and methods. We
welcome papers which present methods, tools, technologies, best
practices and case studies.

Regular paper submissions for I-KNOW may include but are not limited to:

        - Identifying Relationships between different kinds of Knowledge
Entities
        - Service-oriented Architectures for Knowledge Management
Systems
        - Service-based Knowledge Management
        - Orchestration of Knowledge Management Services
        - Distributed Knowledge Management
        - Social Network Analysis
        - Knowledge Work Productivity
        - Communication and Collaboration in Knowledge Management
        - Context and Usage Pattern Identification and Management 
        - Agile Approaches to Knowledge Management

Regular paper submissions for I-MEDIA may include but are not limited
to:

	- Web 2.0 Applications for Content Providers 
	- Business Models for New Media 
	- Social Media Platforms 
 	- User-Generated Content 
	- Cross-Media Content Production and Delivery 
	- Cross-Media Search and Retrieval 
	- New Media Services 
	- Innovative User Interfaces for Media Devices 
	- The Geospatial Web 
	- Marketing of Products and Services via New Media 

Regular paper submissions for I-SEMANTICS may include but are not
limited to:

	- Semantic Social Software 
	- Semantic Wikis and Weblogs
	- Semantic Desktop 
	- Social Tagging and Folksonomies 
 	- Ontology Engineering 
	- Terminology Management
	- Visualisation of Semantic Models
	- Interoperability, Integration and Reasoning
	- Semantic Web Applications 
	- Experiences, Studies and Metrices

Deadlines 
21 May 2007: Full paper submission (4-8 pages)
18 June 2007:   Notification of acceptance
13 July 2007:  Final version (8 pages)
5-7 September 2007: TRIPLE-I Conference

For Author Guidelines and Information about uploading your submission
please visit the respective conference homepage. 

 
Kind regards,
Klaus Tochtermann & Tassilo Pellegrini
TRIPLE-I Conference Chairs

Please accept our apologies should
you receive multiple copies of this
call from different lists.

Call For Papers ICTIR 2007

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE THEORY 
OF INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
ICTIR 2007

http://www.infota.org/ictir2007/index.html
Call for papers
High-quality and original research papers that have not been previously
published and are not under review for another conference or journal are
expected. All submissions will be reviewed for originality, quality as well
as overall contribution to IR. 
Topics of interest
•	Foundations
•	Models
•	Formal techniques
•	Structures
•	Evaluation
•	User issues
•	New approaches
•	Information, meaning, content, entropy
•	Links to other disciplines
•	Web Retrieval
•	Topology 
•	Mathematics of IR
•	Algorithms, complexity
•	Computing (quantum, grid)
•	Physics of IR
•	Philosophy of IR
•	Sociology of IR
•	Pedagogy of IR
•	Linguistics of IR
•	Filtering 
•	Mining 
•	Indexing 
•	Hypermedia 
•	Visualisation
•	Digital Libraries 
•	Semantic Web, Ontologies 
Authors are invited to submit their research papers electronically to the
following email address: dominich@..., following the paper
submission guidelines. 
All accepted papers will be published in Proceedings of ICTIR'07, Alma Mater
Series, ISSN 1587-2386 
•	Paper submission: 10 July 2005
•	Author notification: 10 September 2007
•	Submission of camera-ready copy: 30 September 2007

CFP SIGIR'07 Workshop: Information Retrieval and Applications of Graphical Models.

CALL FOR PAPERS
                    SIGIR'07  Workshop
                        IRGM 2007

Information Retrieval and Applications of Graphical Models

             -- http://irgm.bpiwowar.net --
-----------------------------------------------------------

MOTIVATION:

Probabilistic models constitute an important kind of Information Retrieval
(IR) model. They have been long and widely used, and offer a principled way
of managing the uncertainty that naturally appears in many elements within
this field. Nowadays, the dominant approach for managing probability within
the field of Artificial Intelligence is based on the use of Bayesian
Networks, and these have also been used within IR as extensions of classical
probabilistic models.

Broadly speaking, a Graphical Model (GM)  consists of a qualitative part, a
graph,  which may be directed and acyclic in the case of Bayesian Networks
(BN), and a quantitative one, a collection of numerical parameters, as the
conditional probability tables for BNs or possibility distributions for
possibilistic networks. The knowledge represented in the graphical component
is expressed in terms of dependence and independence relationships between
variables. These relationships are encoded by means of the presence or
absence of links between nodes in the graph. The knowledge represented in
the numerical part quantifies the dependences encoded in the graph, and
allows us to introduce uncertainty into the model.

Therefore, these tools could be very appropriate to model and solve
problems, as those found in the IR field.

GOAL:

As the main goal, this workshop wants to be a common space where
researchers, in general, and young researchers specifically, can show their
innovative GMs applications to the field of IR, in its wide problem space,
opening a new discussion forum. Graphical Models include Bayesian Networks,
possibilistic networks, Markov networks, dependence graphs,  influence
diagrams,  probability trees, decision trees, and Fisher Kernel
Discriminants, among others.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:

The scope of this workshop will be all the applications of any type of GMs
to IR problems. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- Information Retrieval Models for flat or structured document collections
(based on SGML, XML, etc.).
- Cross-language retrieval.
- Web  Information Retrieval / Applications to hypertext.
- Indexing and summarization.
- Multimedia information access, as video, audio or  image retrieval.
- Document filtering. Recommender Systems: content-based and collaborative.
- Question answering and extraction.
- Text data mining and machine learning for IR.
- Document classification and clustering  (for flat or structured documents).
- Any other relevant IR topic.

Theoretical or experimental research papers representing original,
previously unpublished works, are invited to be submitted to the workshop,
not exceeding 8 pages. Positioning papers  describing current research are
also welcome, as well as opinion papers discussing GMs in an IR context.
Paper should emphasize the strengths (and weaknesses) of the GMs to solve an
IR problem, especially with respect to other methods. Contributions will be
peer-reviewed by two experts from the related field belonging to the
workshop PC.

IMPORTANT DATES:

- Deadline for paper submission: May 31th 2007.
- Acceptance / rejection notification: June 19th 2007.
- Deadline for camera ready submission: July 1st 2007.
- Workshop: Amsterdam, July 27th 2007.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

- Peter Bruza (Queensland University of Technology, Australia).
- Eric Horvitz (Microsoft Research, USA).
- Gianni Amati (Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Italy).
- Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil).
- Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow, United Kingdom).
- Luis M. de Campos (Universidad de Granada, Spain).
- Didier Dubois (Université Paul Sabatier, France).
- Pável Calado (Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal).
- Ludovic Denoyer (LIP6, University Paris 6, France).
- Yi Zhang (University of California, USA).
- Alfonso E. Romero (Universidad de Granada, Spain).
- Donald Metzler (University of Massachusetts, USA).
- Dunja Mladenic (Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia).

PAPER PREPARATION AND SUBMISSION:

The submissions, in PDF format, not exceeding 8 pages and following the ACM
Conference style (see the ACM template page
www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html using the "Option 2" style),
will be sent by e-mail to the three organisers.

WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION AND CONTACT INFORMATION:

- Benjamin Piwowarski, Yahoo! Research Latin America (bpiwowar at
yahoo-inc.com).
- Juan M. Fernández-Luna, University of Granada (jmfluna at decsai.ugr.es).
- Juan F. Huete, University of Granada (jhg at decsai.ugr.es).

WORKSHOP WEBSITE:

http://irgm.bpiwowar.net

CfP: STAB'07 - Workshop on Semantic Technology Adoption in Business at ESTC 2007

Apologies for cross posting!

==========================================================

                               Call for Papers

                                 STAB'07

     First International Workshop on Semantic Technology Adoption in 
Business
       To be held at ESTC 2007, in Vienna, Austria, May 31 - June 1, 2007

                      Submission deadline: April 22, 2007

                         http://events.idi.ntnu.no/stab07/

==========================================================

The STAB workshop promotes a forum for the discussion on the analysis
of the value through the adoption of semantic web technologies. The
focus here is on quantitative and qualitative methods for measuring,
predicting, and understanding the value that semantic technologies
bring to the enterprise, and the cost before these technologies are
ready to use. The workshop aims at exploring the practical aspects and
establishing empirically grounded analysis of business cases in order
to provide a better evaluation to the applications of semantic
technologies in industry and public sector.

CALL for PAPERS:

Today's Web has been playing a central role in communication and
cooperation for business applications. While enterprises revolving
around service-oriented architectures, they require more openness,
agility and interoperability for the conceptual modelling, so that the
data can be easily organized and understood across multiple
enterprises. In the recent years, research on semantic web
technologies offers a promising prospect to solve the problem.
However, semantics-driven applications have not been widely used in
industry, because they lack enough evaluation to demonstrate that the
benefits of the new technology will overwhelm the payout.

In order to promote more efficient and effective semantic technology
usage in business, there is a need to contemplate on choice of the
technology by analyzing their quality- and value-added aspects for
enterprises, summarize use cases and identify best practices. Several
issues have been put forward by the current research, like the
workload for annotation, the scalability, the security and privacy and
the balance between the express power and reasoning capability. All
these issue should be seriously considered before putting semantic
technologies in use.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers,
developers, and practitioners to discuss experiences and lessons
learned, identify problems solved and caused, synergize different
views, analyse interplay between quality and value aspects, and
brainstorm future research/development directions. Particularly, we
strongly encourage submissions dealing with semantic technology
adoption and deployment in practice, various usage scenarios and
trade-offs made, etc.

TOPICS of INTEREST:

Submissions that focus on the application of semantic technologies in
business are especially invited. Topics include, but are not limited
to:

    * Applications of semantic technologies in:
          o e-commerce & m-commerce;
          o personalization;
          o context aware services;
          o collaborative applications;
          o security and privacy issues;
          o medicine;
          o geographic information systems;
    * Deployment of semantics based enterprise knowledge management:
          o data and information integration;
          o content exploitation;
          o knowledge discovery and management;
          o rule-based regulation enforcement;
          o ontology and semantics based information retrieval;
          o deployment methods;
    * Task-specific evaluation of semantic technologies and applications:
          o feasibility of existing standards, techniques and languages;
          o ontology quality and value aspects;
          o scenarios for application value optimization;
          o contextualized value and quality;
          o user acceptance of new technology.

SUBMISSIONS:

Workshop submissions will be electronic, in PDF format only, using the
EasyChair submission system. Paper submission will be opened in the
middle of April 2007. We invite submissions of two types: regular
papers, and position statements papers. Regular papers are restricted
to a maximum length of 12 pages, while a maximum length of position
statements papers is 6 pages (including figures, references and
appendices). Submissions must conform to Springer's LNCS format.
Guidelines and templates are available on the web at:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html

Papers will be published in accompanying proceedings.

IMPORTANT DATES:

    * April 22, 2007: Submission of papers
    * May 6, 2007: Notification about decision
    * May 13, 2007: Camera-ready versions due

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS:
    * Darijus Strasunskas (NTNU, Norway), dstrasun at idi.ntnu.no
    * Jinghai Rao (CMU, USA), jinghai at cs.cmu.edu
    * Sari Hakkarainen (NTNU, Norway), sari at idi.ntnu.no

PROGRAM COMMITTEE (tentative):

     * Mats Ahlsen (CNET, Sweden)
     * Rama Akkiraju (IBM Watson, USA)
     * Per Gunnar Auran (Yahoo!, Norway)
     * Rimantas Butleris (KTU, Lithuania)
     * Robert Engels (ESIS, Norway)
     * Jon Atle Gulla (NTNU, Norway)
     * Monika Lanzenberger (TU Wien, Austria)
     * David Norheim (Computas, Norway)
     * Yucel Karabulut (SAP, USA)
     * Anders Kofod-Petersen (NTNU, Norway)
     * Hanna Kozankiewicz (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)
     * Peep Kungas (SOA Trader, Estonia)
     * Norman Sadeh (CMU, USA)
     * Jennifer Sampson (NICTA, Australia)
     * Amit Sheth (Wright State University, USA)
     * Pavel Shvaiko (Univ. of Trento, Italy)
     * Eva Soderstrom (Univ. of Skovde, Sweden)
     * Janis Stirna (Jönköping University, Sweden)
     * Stein L. Tomassen (Sintef, Norway)
     * Csaba Veres (DoD, Australia)
     * Aleksander Øhrn (Fast Search & Transfer, Norway)

--

-- 
==================================================================
Stein L. Tomassen, PhD student
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Web: http://folk.ntnu.no/steint
Office: Room 005, The IT Building, Sem Saelands vei 7-9
Phone: +47 (735) 90788

Karen Spark-Jones

KIDMM '007

CFP SIGIR'07 Workshop PAN. Plagiarism Analysis, Authorship Identification, and Near-Duplicate Detection

1st CALL FOR PAPERS

                       SIGIR'07 Workshop PAN

Plagiarism Analysis, Authorship Identification, and Near-Duplicate Detection

                -- http://www.aisearch.de/pan-07 --

In conjunction with the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on
Research & Development on Information Retrieval, Amsterdam, 23-27 July
2007.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

ABOUT THIS WORKSHOP:

The workshop shall bring together experts and prospective researchers
around the exciting and future-oriented topic of plagiarism analysis,
authorship identification, and high similarity search. This topic receives
increasing attention, which results, among others, from the fact that
information about nearly any subject can be found on the World Wide
Web. At first sight, plagiarism, authorship, and near-duplicates may pose
very different challenges; however, they are closely related in several
technical respects.

Plagiarism analysis is a collective term for computer-based methods to
identify a plagiarism offense. In connection with text documents we
distinguish between corpus-based and intrinsic analysis: the former
compares suspicious documents against a set of potential original
documents, the latter identifies potentially plagiarized passages by
analyzing the suspicious document with respect to changes in writing
style.

Authorship identification divides into so-called attribution and
verification problems. In the authorship attribution problem, one is given
examples of the writing of a number of authors and is asked to determine
which of them authored given anonymous texts. In the authorship
verification problem, one is given examples of the writing of a single
author and is asked to determine if given texts were or were not written
by this author. Authorship verification and intrinsic plagiarism analysis
represent two sides of the same coin.

Near-duplicate detection is mainly a problem of the World Wide Web:
duplicate Web pages increase the index storage space of search engines,
slow down result serving, and decrease the retrieval
precision. Near-duplicate detection relates directly to plagiarism
analysis: at the document level, near-duplicate detection and plagiarism
analysis represent also two sides of the same coin. For a plagiarism
analysis at the paragraph level, the same specialized document models
(e.g. shingling, fingerprinting, hashing) can be applied, where a key
problem is the selection of useful chunks from a document.

The development of new solutions for the outlined problems may benefit
from the combination of existing technologies, and in this sense the
workshop provides a platform that spans different views and
approaches. The following list gives examples from the outlined field for
which contributions are welcome (but not restricted to):

  - retrieval models for plagiarism analysis, authorship identification, and
style analysis
  - software plagiarism, cross-language plagiarism, plagiarism in Web
communities and social networks
  - NLP technologies for authorship identification and style analysis
  - knowledge-based methods for plagiarism analysis and authorship
identification
  - handling proper citation

  - methods for identifying near-duplicate and versioned documents (for all
kinds of contents, including text, source code, image, and music documents)
  - shingling, fingerprinting, and similarity hashing
  - hash-based search, high-dimensional search, approximate nearest neighbor
search
  - efficiency issues and performance tradeoffs

  - tailored indexes for plagiarism analysis and near-duplicate detection
  - plagiarism analysis and near-duplicate detection on the Web
  - evaluation, building of test collections, experimental design and user
studies

IMPORTANT DATES:

Deadline for paper submission	May 27, 2007	  
Notification to authors		June 24, 2007
Camera-ready copy due		July 1, 2007
Workshop opens			July 27, 2007

Contributions will be peer-reviewed by experts from the related field.

WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION:

Benno Stein, Bauhaus University Weimar
Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University, Israel
Efstathios Stamatatos, University of the Aegean

Contact: pan-07@...
URL: http://www.aisearch.de/pan-07

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology

Yaniv Bernstein, Google Switzerland

Dennis Fetterly, Microsoft Research

Graeme Hirst, University of Toronto

Timothy Hoad, Microsoft

Heiko Holzheuer, Lycos Europe

Jussi Karlgren, Swedish Institute of Computer Science

Hans Kleine Büning, University of Paderborn

Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Hermann Maurer, University of Technology Graz

Sven Meyer zu Eissen, Bauhaus University Weimar

Efstathios Stamatatos, University of the Aegean

Benno Stein, Bauhaus University Weimar

Özlem Uzuner, State University of New York

Debora Weber-Wulff, University of Applied Sciences Berlin

Justin Zobel, RMIT University