Category: Conference & Workshop

CLEF 2012: Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum: First Call for Participation

The CLEF 2012 is next year's edition of the popular CLEF campaign and workshop series which has run since 2000 contributing to the systematic evaluation of information access systems, primarily through experimentation on shared tasks. In 2010 CLEF was launched in a new format, as a conference with research presentations, panels, poster and demo sessions and laboratory evaluation workshops. Labs follow under two types: laboratories to conduct evaluation of information access systems, and workshops to discuss and pilot innovative evaluation activities. In 2012, CLEF will take place in September 17-20 in Rome, and researchers and practitioners from all segments of the information access and related communities are invited to participate to the following Evaluation Labs:

• CHiC – Cultural Heritage in CLEF
• CLEF-IP – Informaton Retrieval in the Intellectual Property domain
• ImageCLEF – Cross Language Image Retrieval
• INEX – INitiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval
• PAN – Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Social Software Misuse
• QA4MRE – Question Answering for Machine Reading Evaluation
• RepLab 2012 – Online Reputation Management
• CLEFeHealth – Electronic Health

More information at: http://clef2012.org/

Stefano Ceri will give a keynote talk at the DBDBD on 2 December 2011. Ceri is professor of Database Systems at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He co-authored over 250 articles in International Journals and Conference Proceedings, and is co-author or editor of many international books, including best-selling classics like “Conceptual database design: an Entity-relationship approach” with Carlo Batini and Shamkant Navathe. His research interests cover many aspects of database management systems, including distributed databases, deductive and active databases, streaming data, object orientation, XML query languages, as well as design methods for data-intensive web sites.

Professor Ceri was awarded the prestigious IDEAS Advanced Grant, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), on Search Computing (search-computing.it): Search computing enables answering questions via a constellation of dynamically selected, cooperating, search services. Search computing should enable answering complex queries like: “Who are the strongest European competitors on software ideas?”, “Who is the best doctor to cure insomnia in a nearby hospital?”, or very important for poor PhD students, “Where can I attend an interesting conference in my field closest to a sunny beach?”

More information on: dbdbd.nl

This year's SIGIR best paper award was presented to Mikhail Ageev (Moscow State University), and Qi Guo, Dmitry Lagun, and Eugene Agichtein (Emory University) for their paper Find It If You Can: A Game for Modeling Different Types of Web Search Success Using Interaction Data in which they propose a principled formalization of different types of success for informational search, and a scalable game-like infrastructure for crowdsourcing search behavior studies.

The best student paper award was awarded to Shuang-Hong Yang (Georgia Institute of Technology), Bo Long and Alexander J. Smola (Yahoo! Labs), Hongyuan Zha (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Zhaohui Zheng (Yahoo! Labs Beijing) for their paper Collaborative Competitive Filtering: Learning Recommender using Context of User Choice. The paper proposes Collaborative Competitive Filtering (CCF), a framework for learning user preferences by modeling the choice process in recommender systems.

There were honorable mentions for the papers: Parameterized Concept Weighting in Verbose Queries, Understanding Re-finding Behaviour in Naturalistic Email Interaction Log, Out of sight, not out of mind: On the effect of social and physical detachment on information need, Enhanced Results for Web Search, and Recommending Ephemeral Items at Web Scale.

Ryen White and Jeff Huang received the best paper award at SIGIR 2010 for their paper “Assessing the Scenic Route: Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs”. They present a log-based study estimating the user value of trail following. They demonstrate significant value to users in following trails, especially for certain query types. The findings have implications for the design of search systems, including trail recommendation systems that display trails on search result pages.

The best student paper is written by Ioannis Arapakis, Konstantinos Athanasakos, and Joemon Jose: “A comparison of general vs. personalized affective models for the prediction of topical relevance”. They determined whether the behavioural differences of users have an impact on the models' ability to determine topical relevance, and if, by personalising them, accuracy can be improved.

SIGIR 2010 will begin with a full day of tutorials on July 19, 2010.

Proposals are solicited for tutorials of either a half-day (3 hours plus breaks) or full day (6 hours plus breaks) on all topics of information retrieval and its applications. Each tutorial should cover a single topic in detail. For example, tutorials may cover an information retrieval topic in depth, introduce an emerging application for retrieval technologies, or update the information retrieval community on recent advances in related fields.

Submissions should include a cover sheet and an extended abstract. The cover sheet should specify: (1) the title and length of the tutorial; (2) the intended audience (introductory, intermediate, advanced) and prerequisite knowledge or skills required, if any; (3) complete contact information for the contact person and other presenters; and (4) a brief biography (max. 2 paragraphs) for each presenter. The extended abstract should be 3 to 4 pages, and should include an outline of the tutorial, along with descriptions of the course objectives, its relevance to the information retrieval community, and course materials.

Tutorial proposals in PDF format must be sent via email by February 12, 2010 to tutorials@sigir2010.org. The submissions will undergo peer review and tutorials to be presented will be selected by the SIGIR Program Committee. Notifications will be send out by 24 March, 2010.

More information at SIGIR 2010.

Prof. Gerhard Weikum (MPII, Saarbruecken, Germany) has agreed to give a keynote speech at the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop which takes place on 2 and 3 February 2009 at the University of Twente.

Gerhard Weikum is Research Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) in Saarbruecken, Germany, where he is leading the department on databases and information systems. Prof. Weikum is ACM fellow and a renowned expert in the field of Databases. He received the VLDB 10-Year Achievement Award in 2002. Since then, he focused on several information retrieval problems such as peer-to-peer search, search efficiency, and database and search integration, resulting in for instance 6 full papers at the last SIGIR conferences.

Paper submission deadline: 14 November 2008

The Twente Student Conference on IT is a conference organised twice a year. Students of the bachelor programmes Computer Science and Business Information Technology present the research carried out in the last phase of their programme.

TSConIT takes place on June 23rd (see http://referaat.cs.utwente.nl )

The participants of the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop in Maastricht smile for a team photo: With organiser Ed Hoenkamp left in the middle, and Netherlands most famous IR researcher Keith van Rijsbergen right in the back.

[More info]

The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop (DIR) will take place in Maastricht on April 14-15, 2008. The primary aim of the DIR workshop is to provide an international meeting place where researchers from the domain of information retrieval and related disciplines, can exchange information and present innovative research developments. Hinrich Schuetze of the University of Stuttgart will give an invited talk at DIR2008 about his new book “Introduction to Information Retrieval” which will appear in 2008.

Deadline call for papers: 2 February 2008
http://www.ltci.ugent.be/DIR2008

I will give a lecture on Formal Models at the European Summer School in Information Retrieval in Dublin, Ireland on 5-9 September. More info at the ESSIR 2005 site.