ACM TIST Special Issue on Search and Mining User-generated Contents

Deadline: 1 December 2010
More info at ACM TIST webpage

Social Media have been able to shift the way information is generated and consumed. At first, information was generated by one person and “consumed” by many people, but nowadays most part of the information available in the Web is generated by users, which has changed the needs in information access and management. Social Networks like Facebook or Twitter manage tens of PB of information, with flows of hundreds of TB per day, and hundreds of billions of relationships.

User generated content provides an excellent scenario to apply the metaphor of mining any kind of information. In a social media context, users create a huge amount of data where we can look for valuable nuggets of knowledge by applying diverse search (information retrieval) and mining techniques (data mining, text mining, web mining, opinion mining). In this kind of data, we can find both structured information (ratings, tags, links) and unstructured information (text, audio, video), and we have to learn how to combine existing techniques in order to take advantage of the existing information heterogeneity while extracting useful knowledge.
The primary goal of this special issue of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology is to foster research in the interplay between Social Media, Data/Opinion Mining and Search, aiming to reflect the actual developments on technologies that exploit user generated contents.

Topics of Interest

We invite researchers and professionals from a broad range of disciplines to submit to this special issue. Papers may encompass any or all of the following types of works: foundational theoretical analyses, modelling, simulation, and empirical studies. Moreover, authors may examine different aspects of search and mining user generated contents in a variety of possible contexts. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:


A) Mining Social Media

• Social networks analysis/mining
• Tagging/links/graphs analysis and mining
• Community detection and evolution
• Influence, trust and privacy analysis
• Social media monitoring/analysis

B) Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis

• Opinion extraction/classification/summarization/visualization
• Temporal sentiment analysis
• Cross-lingual/cross-domain sentiment analysis
• Irony detection in opinion mining
• Wish analysis
• Product review analysis

C) Search in Social Media

• Novel social search algorithms
• Social ranking
• Multi-entity search
• Multifaceted search
• User Modelling and Personalization in Social Media

D) Other Social Intelligent Systems

• Social Recommender systems
• Semantic Social Media
• Market analysis
• Cross-lingual/cross-domain social intelligent systems

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts submitted to the special issue should contain original material not published in nor submitted to other journals. Each paper will be reviewed by at least 3 expert reviewers. Papers which do not meet publication quality standards, or does not pass the editorial assessment of suitability of this special issue will be rejected before the review process.
Full papers should be sent via TIST's On-Line Submission system http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tist (please select “Special Issue: Search and Mining User Generated Contents” as the manuscript type), and should not exceed 20 pages length. Details of the journal and manuscript preparation are available on the website: http://tist.acm.org/

Deadline extension: Workshop NLP in the Enterprise: Envisioning the Next 10 Years

The workshop "NLP in the Enterprise: Envisioining the next 10 years" (PLN-E) will be held in Valencia (Spain), as a satellite workshop of SEPLN 2010, on September 6-7, 2010.

PLN-E aims to become a meeting point among academic researchers and companies interested on technologies all along Natural Language Processing and other related technologies like text mining, information retrieval, opinion mining, etc.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
================

We aim the submission of works that shows how NLP can help enterprises to solve problems, or develop new products and services. We expect 3 different types of works:

* (Academic/enterprise) Research works at early stages but with a clear orientation to enterprise applications (products/services)
* Works showing how a certain or several NLP technologies have been successfully used to solve a certain problem (such as developing a new product/service)
* Works from companies explaining certain problems that can not be solved with the actual state of the art on NLP.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the next topics:

A) New NLP Technologies with a clear Application in the Enterprise

1. Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis
2. Monolingual and Multilingual Information Systems
3. Voice Question-Answering Systems
4. Social Intelligent Systems
5. Plagiarism Detection and Systems for Detecting Confidential Information
6. Recommender Systems
7. Illicit contents/Crimes Detection Systems

B) New Application Domains

1. Social Media
2. Mobile Devices
3. Videoconsoles and TDT
4. Virtual Worlds and Massive Multiplayer Games

C) Business Aspects of NLP

1. New Business Models
2. Unsolved Problems
3. Scalability and Performance of NLP Technologies
4. Production Environments for NLP Systems
5. Real-World Datasets Descriptions
6. Demands and Market Needs


DATES
=================

* Deadline [extended]: 28 June 2010
* Acceptance: 15 July 2010
* Camera due: 15 August 2010
* Workshop: 6/7 eptember 2010


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
==================

* Jose Carlos Cortizo (BrainSins, Universidad Europea de Madrid) - contact person (josecarlos.cortizo@wipley.com)
* Jose Maria Gomez (Optenet)
* Francisco Manuel Rangel (Corex)
* Victor Peinado (MAVIR)
* Hugo Zaragoza (Yahoo! Research)
* Francisco Manuel Carrero (BrainSins, Universidad Europea de Madrid)


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
==================

* Rodrigo Agerri (Vicomtech Research Centre)
* Matxalen Alfaro (Sarenet)
* Claudio Baccigalupo (VLEX)
* Sergio Berna (ExperienceOn)
* Enric Castellon (Thera)
* Juan Manuel Cigarran (UNED, Consorcio MAVIR)
* Jesus Contreras (ISOCO)
* Javier Cuervo (Redepyme, EOI)
* Luis Ignacio Diaz (Acciona I+D)
* Jose Gregorio Escalada (Telefonica I+D)
* Diego Exposito (Answare Technologies)
* Angel Faus (VLEX)
* Jorge Garcia Betanzos (Sarenet)
* Ricardo Farreres (Thera)
* Anabel Fraga (UC3M/REUSE)
* Juan Antonio Garrido (i2factory)
* Galo Gimenez (HP)
* Francisco Gomez Molinero (Visual Tools)
* Jose Carlos Gonzalez (Daedalus)
* Carlos Gonzalez (ExperienceOn)
* Alberto Gragera (Tuenti)
* Francesc Grau (Conzentra)
* Carlos Lamas (T-Systems Iberia)
* Didac Lee (Inspirit, Spamina)
* Juan Llorens (UC3M/REUSE)
* Miguel Lucas (Acteo Soluciones)
* Diego Martin (Stratebi Business Solutions)
* Javier Martin (Loogic)
* Juan Carlos Martinez (Corex)
* Daniel Martinez (Indra Software Labs)
* Borja Monsalve (Social Gaming Platform)
* John Paul Moore (ATOS Research)
* Cesar de Pablo (UC3M, Consorcio MAVIR)
* Enrique Puertas (UEM, Consorcio MAVIR)
* Joaquin Rieta (TICSinergies)
* Federico Rodriguez (Stratebi Business Solutions)
* Miguel Angel Rodriguez (Telefonica I+D)
* Antonio Sanchez Valderrabanos (Bitext)
* Estela Saquete (UA, Consorcio MAVIR)
* Isabel Segura (UC3M, Consorcio MAVIR)
* Jim Shur (Strands)
* Jose Luis Suarez (Corex)
* Yaiza Temprado (Telefonica I+D)
* Marc Torrens (Strands)
* Paulo Villegas (Telefonica I+D)
* Pedro Vivancos (Vocali)
* David Zaragoza (Avanzis)

[CFP] SMUC 2010 Workshop @ CIKM 2010

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CALL FOR PAPERS

SMUC2010: 2nd International Workshop on Search and Mining User-generated Contents
http://labs.brainsins.com/events/smuc2010
Workshop at CIKM 2010 (http://www.yorku.ca/cikm10/)
October 30, 2010, Toronto, Canada
Submission deadline: 30 June, 2010
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SMUC10 aims to become a forum for researchers from several Information and Knowledge Management areas like data/text mining, information retrieval, semantics, etc. that apply their work into the fields of Social Media and Opinion/Sentiment Analysis where the main goal is to process user generated contents.

User generated content provides an excellent scenario to apply the metaphor of mining any kind of information. In a social media context, users create a huge amount of data where we can look for valuable nuggets of knowledge by applying several search techniques (information retrieval) or mining techniques (data mining, text mining, web mining, opinion mining, etc.). In this kind of data we can find both structured information (ratings, tags, links, etc.) and unstructured information (text, audio, video, etc.), and we must learn to combine existing techniques in order to take advantage of this heterogeneity while extracting useful knowledge.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
================

SMUC10 workshop is an extraordinary place where to present on-going works that exploit Social Media and/or use Opinion Mining technologies. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

A) Mining Social Media

Social networks analysis/mining
Tagging analysis/mining
Link and graphs analysis/mining
Community detection and evolution
Influence, trust and privacy analysis
Topic detection and trend discovery
Spamming and phishing detection
Wikipedia/Social Media vandalism
Social media monitoring/analysis

B) Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis

Opinion extraction, classification, summarization and visualization
Blogs analysis
Opinion flame
Temporal sentiment analysis
Cross-lingual/cross-domain sentiment analysis
Irony detection in opinion mining
Wish analysis
Product review analysis

C) Search in Social Media

Novel social search algorithms
Social ranking
Multi-entity/Multifaceted search
Multilingual and/or multimedia IR for Social Media
User Modeling and Personalization in Social Media
Architectures, scalability and efficiency

D) Other Social Intelligent Systems

Recommender systems
Semantic Social Media
Plagiarism detection
Market analysis
Cross-lingual/cross-domain social intelligent systems
Business Intelligence Applications (direct marketing, branding, etc.)


DATES
=================

* Submission: 30 June, 2010
* Notification of acceptance: 30 July, 2010
* Camera Ready: 15 August, 2010
* Workshop: 30 October, 2010


SUBMISSIONS
==================

Each contribution should not exceed the length of 8 pages, and must be prepared following ACM camera-ready template: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html

All papers must be submitted in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Please ensure that any special fonts used are included in the submitted documents. Please use the following link to submit your paper: Easychair Submission System for SMUC 2010 http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=smuc2010.

The workshop proceedings will be published as Eproceedings by the same publisher that publishes the CIKM main conference proceedings, and will be in the same CD that contains the CIKM'10 main conference Eproceedings.

We are actually on conversations with a couple of journals to organize a special issue with extended versions of selected papers. The information about this special issue will be published on the workshop's website.


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
==================

* Jose C. Cortizo, BrainSins / European University of Madrid, Spain (contact person, josecarlos.cortizo@wipley.com)
* Francisco M. Carrero, BrainSins / European University of Madrid, Spain
* Ivan Cantador, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain
* Jose A. Troyano, University of Seville, Spain
* Paolo Rosso, Technical University of Valencia, Spain



PROGRAM COMMITTEE
==================

[To be completed]

* Ahmed Abbasi (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA)
* Nitin Agarwal (University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA)
* Enrique Amigo (National University of Distance Education, Spain)
* Ching-Man Au Yeung (NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan)
* Alexandra Balahur (Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy)
* Alberto Barrón (Technical University of Valencia, Spain)
* Dominik Benz (University of Kassel, Germany)
* Pushpak Bhattacharyya (IIT Bombay, India)
* Erik Cambria (University of Stirling, Scotland)
* Pablo Castells (Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain)
* Meeyoung Cha (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea)
* Fermin Cruz (University of Seville, Spain)
* Victor Diaz (University of Seville, Spain)
* Viet Ha-Thuc (University of Iowa, USA)
* Akshay Java (MSN Microsoft, USA)
* Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
* Zornitsa Kozareva (Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, USA)
* Hady W. Lauw (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore)
* Luis Martin (BrainSins, Spain)
* Patricio Martinez-Barco (University of Alicante, Spain)
* Andres Montoyo (University of Alicante, Spain)
* Claudiu C. Musat (Politechnical University of Bucharest, Romania)
* Manuel Palomar (University of Alicante, Spain)
* Manos Papagelis (University of Toronto, Canada)
* Victor Peinado (National University of Distance Education, Spain)
* Isabella Peters (University of Duesseldorf, Germany)
* Martin Potthast (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany)
* Antonio Reyes (Technical University of Madrid, Spain)
* Horacio Rodriguez (Technical University of Catalonia, Spain)
* Efstathios Stamatatos (University of Aegean, Greece)
* Benno Stein (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany)
* Ralf Steinberger (European Commission, Joint Research Centre)
* Markus Strohmaier (Graz University of Technology, Austria)
* Jie Tang (Tsinghua University, China)
* Jordi Turmo (Technical University of Catalonia, Spain)
* Luis Alfonso Ureña (University of Jaen, Spain)

Workshop NLP in the Enterprise: Envisioning the Next 10 Years

The workshop "NLP in the Enterprise: Envisioining the next 10 years" (PLN-E) will be held in Valencia (Spain), as a satellite workshop of SEPLN 2010, on September 6-7, 2010.

PLN-E aims to become a meeting point among academic researchers and companies interested on technologies all along Natural Language Processing and other related technologies like text mining, information retrieval, opinion mining, etc.

Topics of Interest

We aim the submission of works that shows how NLP can help enterprises to solve problems, or develop new products and services. We expect 3 different types of works:

• (Academic/enterprise) Research works at early stages but with a clear orientation to enterprise applications (products/services)
• Works showing how a certain or several NLP technologies have been successfully used to solve a certain problem (such as developing a new product/service)
• Works from companies explaining certain problems that can not be solved with the actual state of the art on NLP.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the next topics:

A) New NLP Technologies with a clear Application in the Enterprise

1. Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis
2. Monolingual and Multilingual Information Systems
3. Voice Question-Answering Systems
4. Social Intelligent Systems
5. Plagiarism Detection and Systems for Detecting Confidential Information
6. Recommender Systems
7. Illicit contents/Crimes Detection Systems

B) New Application Domains

1. Social Media
2. Mobile Devices
3. Videoconsoles and TDT
4. Virtual Worlds and Massive Multiplayer Games

C) Business Aspects of NLP

1. New Business Models
2. Unsolved Problems
3. Scalability and Performance of NLP Technologies
4. Production Environments for NLP Systems
5. Real-World Datasets Descriptions
6. Demands and Market Needs

Dates

• Submission: 15 June, 2010
• Notification of acceptance: 15 July, 2010
• Camera Ready: 15 August, 2010
• Workshop: 6/7 de September, 2010

CFPs on Recommender Systems

There are several call for papers for conferences and journals related to Recommender Systems. Conferences:

• IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology. Deadline: 26 March 2010.
• WI–IAT 2010 Workshop on Web Personalization and Recommender Systems (WebPRES 2010). Deadline: 16 April 2010.
• Trust and Recommender Systems for Social Search and Web-Log Analysis. Deadline: 16 April.
• ACM Recommender Systems. Deadline: 16 April (abstracts), 23 April 2010 (papers).

Journals/Special Issues:

• Special Issue on: "Recommender Systems to Support the Dynamics of Virtual Learning Communities" on International Journal of Web Based Communities. Deadline: 30 March 2010.
• Special Issue on "Social Linking and Hypermedia", on New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. Deadline: 11 June 2010.
• Special Issue on "Social Recommender Systems", on ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. Deadline: 16 July 2010.
• Special Issue on "Adaptation and Personalization for Ubiquitous Computing", on Personal and Ubiquitous Computing (Springer). Deadline: 30 November 2010.
  
• Social Network Analysis and Mining, Springer.
  
  

ACM RecSys workshops were published some days ago. There are 7 different workshops related to Recommender Systems, so we'll have more CFPs soon.

CFP: APRESW Extended to March 15

APRESW 2010 (1st International Workshop on Adaptation, Personalization and REcommendation in the Social-semantic Web), colocated under the ESWC 2010, has extended its deadline to March 15.

1st International Workshop on Adaptation, Personalization and REcommendation in the Social-semantic Web (APRESW 2010)

Call for Papers: 1st International Workshop on Adaptation, Personalization and REcommendation in the Social-semantic Web (APRESW 2010)
30 or 31 May 2010 | Heraklion, Greece
http://nets.ii.uam.es/apresw2010/

In conjunction with the
7th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2010)
http://www.eswc2010.org/


+++++++++++++++
Important dates
+++++++++++++++

* Paper submission: 7 March 2010
* Notification of paper acceptance/rejection: 5 April 2010
* Camera-ready copies of accepted papers: 18 April, 2010
* APRESW 2010 Workshop: 30 or 31 May 2010

++++++++++
Motivation
++++++++++

During the last years, researchers and practitioners of the Semantic Web have progressively consolidated a number of very important achievements. Formal languages have been standardized to define ontology-based knowledge representations, logic formalisms and query models. Ontology engineering methodologies and tools have been proposed to ease the designing and populating of ontological knowledge bases. Reasoning engines have been implemented to exploit inference capabilities of ontologies, and semantic-based frameworks have been built to enrich the functionalities of Web services. These achievements are the pillars to deal with the complex challenge of bringing semantics to the Web.

The above gives a new ground to extend the focus of the Semantic Web by engaging it in other communities, where semantics can play an important role. The available semantic knowledge bases can be used to enrich and link additional repositories, ontology engineering techniques can be utilized to properly design and build ontologies in further real-world domains, and inference and query mechanisms can enhance classic information management and retrieval approaches.

Among these communities, this workshop aims to attract the attention of students and professionals both from academia and industry who take benefit of semantic-based techniques and technologies in within-application Adaptation, Personalization and Recommendation approaches. In parallel to the progress made in the Semantic Web research topics, there have been appearing works in the above areas that use ontologies to model the user’s preferences, tastes and interests, and exploit these personal features together with meta-information about multimedia contents in order to provide the user with adaptation and personalization capabilities for different purposes such as information retrieval and item recommendation.

Moreover, with the advent of the Web 2.0 (also called the Social Web), the potential study and development of those approaches have increased exponentially. Social networks allow people to provide explicit relationships with others, and find out implicit user similarities based on their profiles. Social tagging services offer the opportunity to easily create and exploit personal knowledge representations. Wiki-style sites represent an environment where the community contributes and shares information, and blogs are media in which users express subjective opinions.

In all of these scenarios, adaptation, personalization and recommendation are core functionalities. However, the understanding and exploitation of the semantics underlying user and item profiles are still open issues.

++++++++++++++++++
Topics of interest
++++++++++++++++++

The workshop will focus on establishing user/usage models for adaptation, personalization and recommendation approaches for the Social-semantic Web.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the exploitation of the Web of Data, the identification of semantics underlying social annotations of multimedia contents, and the application of semantic-based techniques and technologies in research fields related to:

* Personalized access to multimedia content
* Content-based recommendation and collaborative filtering
* Adaptive exploration of multimedia content
* Adaptive user interfaces for multimedia content browsing and searching
* Community extraction and exploitation
* Social networks analysis for collaborative recommendation
* User profile construction based on social tagging information
* Context-aware multimedia content access and delivery
* Mobile and ubiquitous multimedia content access and delivery

++++++++++++++++++++
Organizing Committee
++++++++++++++++++++

* Iván Cantador, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
* Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research, Spain
* David Vallet, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
* José C. Cortizo, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain
* Francisco M. Carrero, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain

+++++++++++++++++
Program Committee
+++++++++++++++++

* Sofia Angeletou, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK
* Ching-man Au Yeung, NTT Communication Science Labs, Japan
* Pablo Castells, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
* Manuel Cebrián, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
* Rosta Farzan, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
* Miriam Fernández, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK
* Enrique Frías, Telefónica I+D, Spain
* Ana García-Serrano, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain
* Andrés García-Silva, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
* Tom Heath, Talis, UK
* Frank Hopfgartner, University of Glasgow, UK
* Ioannis Konstas, University of Edinburgh, UK
* Estefanía Martín, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
* Phivos Mylonas, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
* Daniel Olmedilla, Telefónica I+D, Spain
* Carlos Pedrinaci, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK
* Jérôme Picault, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France
* Francesco Ricci, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
* Sergey A. Sosnovsky, University of Pittsburgh, USA
* Martin Szomszor, City University London, UK
* Marc Torrens, Strands, Spain
* Paulo Villegas, Telefónica I+D, Spain

++++++++++
Organizers
++++++++++

* Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, http://www.uam.es/
* Yahoo! Research, http://research.yahoo.com/
* Universidad Europea de Madrid, http://www.esp.uem.es/gsi/

++++++++
Sponsors
++++++++

* Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación de España (CENIT-2007-1012), https://i3media.barcelonamedia.org/
* Consorcio MAVIR, http://www.mavir.net
* Sistema Madri+d, http://www.madrimasd.org

+++++++++++++++++++
Contact information
+++++++++++++++++++

Dr. Iván Cantador
Departamento de Ingeniería Informática
Escuela Politécnica Superior
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
E-mail: ivan.cantador@uam.es
Phone: +34 91 497 2358

[REMINDER] Special Issue of International Journal of Electronic Commerce on Mining Social Media

The deadline fot the special issue on Mining Social Media on the International Journal of Electronic Commerce is approaching (deadline for abstract is January 15). If you are interested on publishing on this special issue, please, take care about the dates.

CFP: Special Issue of International Journal of Electronic Commerce on Mining Social Media

After the experience of organizing the 1st International Workshop on Social Media (papers now online), we've been organizing a special issue of the IJEC (International Journal of Electronic Commerce) on Mining Social Media. Now we release the CFP hoping to receive high quality papers on Mining Social Media:


OVERVIEW

Recently, Forrester published a report, “The Future of the Social Web” where they sketched a timeline of the development of the Social Web, dividing its evolution in 5 eras. According to that report, the first era of the development of the Social Web started to explode the social relationships among users. Then, in the social functionality era, these social relationships resulted in the social functionality era where several websites started to add social functionalities in order to help users to interact with their peers. We are now in the era of Social Colonization, where technologies like Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect have standardized social functionalities among websites and a vast majority of websites now include several social functionalities. Soon these federated identities will empower people to enter the era of social context with personalized and social content, and the development of tools for personalize social content will aim the development of the era of social commerce.

The primary goal of the proposed special issue of International Journal of Electronic Commerce is to foster research in the interplay between Social Media, Data Mining and Electronic Commerce, trying to reflect the actual developments on technologies that fit on the Social Context era.


SCOPE

The International Journal of Electronic Commerce is the #1-ranked journal on Electronic Commerce globally. This Special Issue will provide a significant opportunity for authors to publish important novel and original contributions in the area of Data Mining applied to Social Media. The guest editors seek papers and proposals that address various aspects of Mining Social Media, including recommender systems for social media, data mining algorithms designed to explode Social Networks, information management for Social Networks, etc.


RESEARCH QUESTIONS

We invite scholars and professionals from a broad range of disciplines to submit to this Special Issue. Papers may encompass any or all of the following: foundational theoretical analyses, modelling, simulation, and empirical studies. Authors may examine different aspects of mining social media in any of a variety of possible contexts. Special topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

A. Data Mining for Social Networks

• Novel Algorithms
• Association Rules
• Mining semi-structured data
• Classification and Ranking
• Clustering
• Text Mining
• Machine Learning
• Privacy Preserved Data Mining
• Statistical Methods
• Temporal and spatial data mining
• Parallel and Distributed Data Mining
• Interactive and Online Mining
• Data and Knowledge Visualization
• Multimedia mining (audio/video)
• Ensemble Methods
• Web Mining
• Graph Mining
• Link Mining

B. Information Management for Social Networks

• Recommender Systems
• Information Retrieval
• Sentiment Analysis
• Natural Language Processing
• Question Answering
• Semantic Processing
• Graph Analysis and Complex Networks
• Social Network Analysis

C. Possible applications

• Electronic Commerce
• E-Mail Spam Detection
• Blog/Social Networks Spam Detection
• Community Detection
• Users/content recommenders
• Trends discovery
• Blogs/Social Networks Community Dynamics
• User Reviews Ranking
• Blogs/Social Networks Contributions Summarization
• Abuse/Fraud Detection
• User Profile Modelling
• Event Detection and Tracking in Social Media
• Online Advertising


SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Manuscripts submitted to the special issue should contain original material not published in nor submitted to other journals. Each manuscript has to have a cover page with the author information and another page with title and abstract but the author information omitted. The review process is double-blind and papers which do not meet publication quality standards will be rejected before the review process.

Interested authors are required to submit extended abstracts of no more than two pages for their planned submissions. This will give the editorial team an opportunity to determine if a given submission is appropriate for expedited handling and review.

Full papers should be sent via e-mail to Jose Carlos Cortizo <josecarlos.cortizo@wipley.com> in anonymized PDF Format, not including any author names or affiliations, and should not exceed 40 pages.


IMPORTANT DATES

• Abstracts DeadLine: 15 January 2010
• Abstracts Feedback: 30 January 2010
• Full Paper Submission: 15 April 2010
• Revision Notification: 1 June 2010
• Revised Manuscripts: 1 August 2010
• Final Decision: 1 October 2010
  

MSM09, Deadline Extended until September 6

The submission deadline for the 1st International Workshop on Mining Social Media has been extended until 6th of September. If you're working on any possible application of data mining techniques, or even recommender systems, information retrieval or any other Information Access technique to Social Media, this is a very good place to submit your work.

1st International Workshop on Mining Social Media

I'm very glad to announce the MSM09 workshop that we are organizing in Sevilla (Spain), November 9. I hope to see some of you there :D

-------------------------------------------------------
CALL FOR PAPERS

1st International Workshop on Mining Social Media
http://www.socialgamingplatform.com/msm09/
Workshop at CAEPIA 2009 (http://www.lsi.us.es/caepia09)
November 9, 2009, Sevilla, Spain
Submission deadline: July 31, 2009
-------------------------------------------------------

OVERVIEW

Social Media are technological tools that allow users sharing and discuss information. Most Social Media are Internet based applications that manage textual information, as blogs (Blogger, Wordpress), microblogging (Twitter, Pownce), wikis (Wikipedia), forums, or Social Networks (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn). But there also exist other Social Media Internet applications where users share more than text, as photo sharing tools (Flickr, Picasa), video sharing (YouTube, Vimeo), livecasting (Ustream), or audio and music sharing (last.fm, ccMixter, FreeSound). More recent Social Media includes virtual worlds (Second Life), online gaming (World of Warcraft, WarHammer Online), game sharing (Miniclip.com) and Mobile Social Media like Nomad Social Networks where users share their current position in the Real World.

Social Media have been able to shift the way information is generated and consumed. At first, information was generated by one person and “consumed” by many people, but now the information is generated by many people and consumed by many people, changing the needs in information access and management. It is also noticeable that Social Media applications manage huge quantities of users and data: Facebook and MySpace manage between 100 and 150 million users, it is estimated that 1 million blog posts are generated each day, microblogging services like Twitter generates 3 million messages each day, YouTube manages more that 150.000 million videos, etc. All these points make clear that Social Media is an excellent application field for data miners.


CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

The Mining Social Media workshop aims to bring practitioners but also researchers with a specific focus on the application of existent or novel Data Mining techniques into the field of Social Media. We encourage the submission of experimental papers where Data Mining techniques are applied into existent Social Media, but also more theoretical papers that show clear application in real Social Media applications. The interesting topics include blog post analysis, blog comments analysis, blog spam, recommender systems for Social Media, clickstream analysis, relevance analysis, spam users detection, behavior analysis, contextual mining, Social Media user segmentation, route analysis for nomad Social Networks, multimedia mining, search in Social Media, etc.

All the submissions must be practical or theoretical applications of Data Mining or Information Management to Social Media (blogs, wikis, social networks, social services, e-mail, etc.).

A. Data Mining for Social Networks
* Novel Algorithms
* Association Rules
* Mining semi-structured data
* Classification and Ranking
* Clustering
* Text Mining
* Machine Learning
* Privacy Preserved Data Mining
* Statistical Methods
* Temporal and spatial data mining
* Parallel and Distributed Data Mining
* Interactive and Online Mining
* Data and Knowledge Visualization
* Multimedia mining (audio/video)
* Ensemble Methods
* Web Mining
* Graph Mining
* Link Mining
B. Information Management for Social Networks
* Recommender Systems
* Information Retrieval
* Sentiment Analysis
* Natural Language Processing
* Question Answering
* Semantic Processing
* Graph Analysis and Complex Networks
* Social Network Analysis
C. Possible applications
* E-Mail Spam Detection
* Blog/Social Networks Spam Detection
* Community Detection
* Users/content recommenders
* Trends discovery
* Blogs/Social Networks Community Dynamics
* User Reviews Ranking
* Blogs/Social Networks Contributions Summarization
* Abuse/Fraud Detection
* User Profile Modeling
* Event Detection and Tracking in Social Media

We welcome contributions through research papers and industrial reports/case studies on applications. We also welcome work-in-progress contributions, as well papers discussing potential research directions.


IMPORTANT DATES

* Deadline for submission: 31 July 2009
* Notification of acceptance: 17 September 2009
* Workshop: 9 November 2009


INVITED SPEAKER

* William W. Cohen (Carnegie Mellon University)


INDUSTRY PANEL

The Industry Panel features panelists from several Social Media companies, who will give their vision about needs, opportunities and current solutions of Data Mining and related techniques to real Social Media solutions. Up to date, Strands (http://www.strands.com) and Tuenti (http://www.tuenti.com) have confirmed their presence in this panel.


SUBMISSION OF PAPERS

Submissions must be anonymous. Papers must be sent in a PDF file, written in English and not exceed 12 pages including figures, references, etc. and should be formatted according to the Springer LNAI guidelines. Papers will be reviewed by at least two PC members, and accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. We are currently studying the possibility of publishing Springer post-proceedings and a special issue on a Data Mining journal.


SPONSORS (confirmed as of May 3, 2009):

* MAVIR (http://www.mavir.net)
* UEM (http://www.uem.es)
* Fundación Madri+D para el Conocimiento (http://www.madrimasd.org)
* STRANDS (http://www.strands.com)


ORGANIZATION COMMITEE

* Jose Carlos Cortizo (Social Gaming Platform, Universidad Europea de Madrid) - primary contact (josecarlos.cortizo@wipley.com)
* Francisco Manuel Carrero (Social Gaming Platform, Universidad Europea de Madrid)
* Jose Maria Gomez (Optenet)
* Enrique Puertas (Universidad Europea de Madrid)
* Borja Monsalve (Social Gaming Platform, Universidad Europea de Madrid)


PROGRAM COMMITEE

* Nitin Agarwal (University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA)
* Aris Anagnostopoulos (Sapienza Università di Roma , Italy)
* Raul Arrabales (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
* Dominik Benz (University of Kassel, Germany)
* Paolo Boldi (University of Milano, Italy)
* Iván Cantador (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid & University of Glasgow, United Kingdom)
* Francisco Manuel Carrero (Social Gaming Platform, Spain)
* Pablo Castells (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain)
* Meeyoung Cha (Max Planck Institute, Germany)
* Yun Chi (Nec Laboratories America, USA)
* Jose Carlos Cortizo (Social Gaming Platform, Spain)
* Debora Donato (Yahoo! Research, Spain)
* Cesar Estebanez (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
* Jose Maria Gomez (Optenet, Spain)
* Antonio Gulli (Ask.com, Italy)
* Viet Ha-Thuc (University of Iowa, USA)
* José Antonio Iglesias Martínez (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
* Akshay Java (MSN Microsoft, USA)
* Gueorgi Kossinets (Google, USA)
* Zornitsa Kozareva (Universidad de Alicante, Spain)
* Beate Krause (University of Kassel, Germany)
* Emmanuelle Lebhar (CNRS & Universidad de Chile, Chile)
* Agapito Ledezma Espino (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
* Kristina Lerman (USC Information Sciences Institute, California, USA)
* Ee-Peng Lim (Singapore Management University, Singapore)
* Stéphane Marchand-Maillet (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
* Luis Martin (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain)
* Borja Monsalve (Social Gaming Platform, Spain)
* Cesar de Pablo (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
* Manos Papagelis (University of Toronto, Canada)
* Victor Peinado (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain)
* Enrique Puertas (Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain)
* Josep Lluis de la Rosa (Universidad de Girona & Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)
* Sara Owsley Sood (Pomona College, USA)
* Markus Strohmaier (Graz University of Technology, Austria)
* Yaiza Temprado (Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain)
* Marc Torrens (Strands, Spain)

SSMS 2009 - Summer School on Multimedia Semantics

** SSMS 2009 - SUMMER SCHOOL ON MULTIMEDIA SEMANTICS ** -- University of Koblenz, Germany --

Managing and Modeling of Multimedia and User Generated Content in Web 3.0

http://www.smart-society.net/ssms09 23-28 August 2009, Koblenz, Germany Application deadline: 15 May 2009 (Friday)

INTRODUCTION

We are pleased to announce 4th edition of Summer School on Multimedia Semantics. This summer school series successfully started in 2006, each year offering top level education at great European locations (Kallithea, Greece; Glasgow, UK; Crete, Greece) for students from all over the world. Summer School on Multimedia Semantics is intended for PhD and Master students, who want to learn more on use of semantics in various media. We offer lectures by leading researchers in the field. Organized student poster sessions will create unique networking opportunities. They are excellent place to present your work, get comments and feedback from senior researchers, or exchange ideas with other participants.

PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS:

• Social Media Modeling
• Audio Processing and Semantics
• Video Analysis and Semantic Retrieval
• Multimedia Personalization

LECTURERS:

• Prof. Dr. Karlheinz Brandenburg (IDMT Fraunhofer, Germany)
• Prof. Dr. Andreas Nuernberger (University of Magdeburg, Germany)
• Prof. Dr. Lynda Hardman (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Netherlands)
• Prof. Dr. Steffen Staab (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany)
• Prof. Dr. Andreas Hotho (University of Kassel, Germany)
• Dr. Marcel Worring (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• Prof. Dr. Fabio Ciravegna (University of Sheffield, England)
• Dr. Yiannis Kompatsiaris (ITI, Greece)
• Prof. Dr. Noel O`Connor (Dublin City University, Ireland)
• Dr. Ansgar Scherp (University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany)

APPLICATION PROCEDURE:

We welcome applicants from anywhere in the world. Summer school is mainly addressed for graduate students (Masters and PhD). Each participant is required to bring a poster presenting her/his work. Organized poster sessions will allow to exchange ideas and get feedback on your research. Applications must be send directly to Ruth Götten ( confsec@uni-koblenz.de ) - PDF, ?MsWord or plain text are preferred.

Application must include: - your name, - organization, - name of your supervisor(s), - abstract of your work (limit: 1 page)

More details available at: http://www.smart-society.net/ssms09/index.php?page=registration

CONTACT: confsec@uni-koblenz.de

VENUE:

Koblenz (which means: merging of the rivers) is situated in the picturesque valley of the Rhine and Moselle. Middle Rhine Valley is a UNESCO World Heritage site ( http://www.welterbe-mittelrheintal.de ) City is by four mountain ranges with many vineyards in the valley, its narrow alleyways and happy atmosphere, Koblenz is welcoming town for guests from all over the world. The town has old traditions, reaching over 2000 years to the times of the Roman empire. More at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koblenz

ACCOMMODATION AND SOCIAL EVENTS:

The Summer School classes will be held at the Campus of the University Koblenz-Landau ( http://www.uni-koblenz.de ). Suggested accommodation is provided by "Contel" Hotel ( http://www.contel-koblenz.de ) in Koblenz, which is conveniently located within walking distance from the Koblenz campus. Various other options for housing in different price ranges are also available - check SSMS'09 website for more details. Study hard and enjoy summer! Each
day of intensive study is followed by a different social event. Participants and lecturers will find many opportunities to talk, socialize and have more direct contact outside of the classroom. On Wednesday we plan a longer, half-day trip outside of Koblenz.

CALENDAR:

• Application deadline: 15 May 2009 Acceptance notification: 1 June 2009
• Registration deadline: 15 June 2009 Summer School: 23 - 28 August

COST:

The tuition fee for each student is 350 EUR. It covers lectures, meals, excursion and other organized social events. Accommodation is NOT included in the tuition. If you have questions, please contact Ruth Götten at confsec@uni-koblenz.de

STUDENT SCHOLARSHIPS

We offer a limited number of student scholarships that cover the tuition fee for the summer school. To apply for a scholarship, please attach a letter to your application (limit 1 page) explaining what you expect to learn during the summer school in Koblenz, motivate why you apply for this scholarship and clarify why you cannot use other funds.

ADVISORY BOARD:

• Dr. Yiannis Kompatsiaris, ITI, Greece
• Prof. Dr. Ebroul Izquierdo, Queen Mary University London, England
• Prof. Dr. Lynda Hardman, CWI, The Netherlands
• Prof. Dr. Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield, England
• Prof. Dr. Alan Smeaton, Dublin City University, Ireland

ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITTEE:

• Prof. Dr. Steffen Staab
• Dr. Ansgar Scherp
• Dr. Marcin Grzegorzek
• Dr. Maciej Janik
• Ruth Götten, Dipl.-Päd.

IEEE International Conference on Data Mining 2009

December 6-9, 2009 Miami, U.S.A.

The IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) has established itself as the world's premier research conference in data mining. The 2009 edition of ICDM provides a leading forum for presentation of original research results, as well as exchange and dissemination of innovative, practical development experiences.

The conference covers all aspects of data mining, including algorithms, software and systems, and applications. In addition, ICDM draws researchers and application developers from a wide range of data mining related areas such as statistics, machine learning, pattern recognition, databases and data warehousing, data visualization, knowledge-based systems, and high performance computing.

By promoting novel, high quality research findings, and innovative solutions to challenging data mining problems, the conference seeks to continuously advance the state-of-the-art in data mining.

Besides the technical program, the conference will feature workshops, tutorials, panels, and the ICDM data mining contest.

Topics of Interest

• Data mining foundations
• • Novel data mining algorithms in traditional areas (such as classification, regression, clustering, probabilistic modeling, pattern discovery, and association analysis)
  • Models and algorithms for new, structured, data types, such as arising in chemistry, biology, environment, and other scientific domains
  • Developing a unifying theory of data mining
  • Mining sequences and sequential data
  • Mining spatial and temporal datasets
  • Mining textual and unstructured datasets
  • Distributed data mining
  • High performance implementations of data mining algorithms
  • Privacy and anonymity-preserving data analysis
• Mining in emerging domains
• • Stream data mining
  • Mining moving object data, RFID data, and data from sensor networks
  • Ubiquitous knowledge discovery
  • Mining multi-agent data
  • Mining and link analysis in networked settings: web, social and computer networks, and online communities
  • Mining the semantic web
  • Data mining in electronic commerce, such as recommendation, sponsored web search, advertising, and marketing tasks
• Methodological aspects and the KDD process
• • Data pre-processing, data reduction, feature selection, and feature transformation
  • Quality assessment, interestingness analysis, and post-processing
  • Statistical foundations for robust and scalable data mining
  • Handling imbalanced data
  • Automating the mining process and other process related issues
  • Dealing with cost sensitive data and loss models
  • Human-machine interaction and visual data mining
  • Integration of data warehousing, OLAP and data mining
  • Data mining query languages
  • Security and data integrity
• Integrated KDD applications, systems, and experiences
• • Bioinformatics, computational chemistry, ecoinformatics
  • Computational finance, online trading, and analysis of markets
  • Intrusion detection, fraud prevention, and surveillance
  • Healthcare, epidemic modeling, and clinical research
  • Customer relationship management
  • Telecommunications, network and systems management
  • Sustainable mobility and intelligent transportation systems

Important Dates

• April 13, 2009 - Deadline for workshop proposals
• June 26, 2009 - Deadline for paper submission, tutorial submission, and panel proposals
• September 4, 2009 - Notification to authors
• September 28, 2009 - Deadline for camera-ready copies
• December 6-9, 2009 Conference

CFP: 25th Conference of the SEPLN (Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing)

September 8-10, 2009
Palacio Miramar, Donostia - San Sebastián
http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/sepln2009/

INTRODUCTION

The 25th edition of the Annual Conference of the Spanish Society for Natural Language Processing (SEPLN) will take place in the Miramar Palace in San Sebastian on September 8, 9 and 10, 2008.

We also expect to organise three satellite workshops during the week of the conference (see list of workshops).

The huge amount of information available in digital format and in different languages demands systems that enable us to access this vast library in an increasingly more structured way.

In this same area, there is a renewed interest in improving information accessibility and information exploitation in multilingual environments. Many of the formal foundations for dealing appropriately with these necessities have been, and are still being established in the area of Natural Language Processing and its many branches:

• Information extraction and retrieval, Questions answering systems,
• Machine Translation, Automatic analysis of textual content, Text
• Generation, and Speech recognition and synthesis.

The aim of the conference is to provide a forum for discussion and communication where the latest research work and developments in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be presented by scientific and business communities. The conference also aims at exposing new possibilities of real applications and R&D projects in this field.

Moreover, as in previous editions, there is the intention of identifying future guidelines or paths for basic research and foreseen software applications, in order to compare them against the market needs. Finally, the conference intends to be an appropriate forum in helping new professionals to become active members in this field.


TOPICS

Researchers and companies are encouraged to send communications, project abstracts or demonstrations related to any of the following language technology topics:

• Linguistic, mathematic and psycholinguistic models of language
• Corpus linguistics
• Development of linguistic resources and tools
• Grammars and formalisms for morphological and syntactic analysis
• Semantics, pragmatics and discourse
• Lexical ambiguity resolution
• Machine Learning in NLP
• Monolingual and multilingual text generation
• Machine translation
• Speech synthesis and recognition
• Monolingual and multilingual information extraction and retrieval
• Question answering systems
• Automatic textual content analysis
• Text summarization
• NLP-based generation of teaching resources
• NLP for languages with limited resources
• NLP industrial applications

STRUCTURE OF THE CONFERENCE

The conference will last three days, and will consist of sessions devoted to presenting papers, posters, ongoing research projects, prototype product demonstrations or products connected with topics addressed in the conference. Besides, we expect to organize three satellite workshops during the week of the conference.


SUBMISSIONS

The proposal must be submitted earlier than April 24, 2009 and they must meet certain format and style requirements.

Both the delivery and revision of proposals will be done exclusively in PDF electronic format via the Myreview system. We recommend using the LaTeX and Word templates that can be downloaded from the conference webpage.

Besides, the proposals will have to comply the following requirements, depending if they are communications, demos or projects.


COMMUNICATIONS

Authors are encouraged to send theoretical or system-related proposals.

The proposals must include the following sections:

• A title of the communication.
• The complete names of the authors, their affiliations, address, and e-mail (anonymous in the submitted proposal).
• An abstract in English and Spanish (maximum 150 words), including a list of keywords or related topics.
• The proposal can be written and presented in Spanish or English, and its overall maximum length will be 8 pages, excluding references, which can take up an additional whole page at the most.
• The documents must not include headings or footnotes.

The papers proposed will be assessed at least by three reviewers, and can be accepted to be presented either as posters or as communications, depending on the program necessities. However, no distinction will be made between communications and posters in the printed version of the SEPLN magazine.


PROJECTS AND DEMOS

As in previous editions, the organizers encourage participants to give oral presentations of R&D projects and demos of systems or tools related to the NLP field. For oral presentations on R&D projects to be accepted, the following information must be included:

• Project title
• Name, affiliation, address, e¬mail and phone number of the project director
• Funding institutions
• Groups participating in the project
• Abstract (2 pages maximum)

For demonstrations to be accepted, the following information is mandatory:

• Demo title
• Name, affiliation, e-mail and phone number of the authors
• Abstract (2 pages maximum)
• Time estimation for the whole presentation

IMPORTANT DATES

• April 24, 2009: Deadline for submitting papers, projects and demos
• May 25, 2009: Notification of acceptance
• June 19, 2009: Deadline for submitting the final version
• July 15, 2009: Deadline for early registration
• Sept. 7, 2009: Workshops
• Sept. 8, 9 & 10: 25th SEPLN Conference

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

Chairman: Kepa Sarasola (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea)

Members:

* Itziar Aduriz (Universitat de Barcelona)
* José Gabriel Amores (Universidad de Sevilla)
* Jose Maria Arriola (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea)
* Xabier Artola (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea)
* Toni Badía (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
* Manuel de Buenaga (Universidad Europea de Madrid)
* Irene Castellón (Universitat de Barcelona)
* Arantza Díaz de Ilarraza (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea)
* Víctor Díaz Madrigal (Universidad de Sevilla)
* Antonio Ferrández (Universitat d'Alacant)
* Mikel Forcada (Universitat d'Alacant)
* Ana García-Serrano (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
* Alexander Gelbukh (Instituto Politécnico Nacional. México)
* Koldo Gojenola (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea)
* Xavier Gómez Guinovart (Universidade de Vigo)
* Julio Gonzalo (UNED)
* José Miguel Goñi (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
* José Carlos González (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
* Montserrat Marichalar (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea)
* José Mariño (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)
* M. Antonia Martí (Universitat de Barcelona)
* María Teresa Martín (Universidad de Jaén)
* Patricio Martínez (Universitat d'Alacant)
* Paloma Martínez (Universidad Carlos III, Madrid)
* Raquel Martínez (UNED)
* Ruslan Mitkov (Universidad de Wolverhampton)
* Manuel Montes y Gómez (Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y
Electrónica. México)
* Lidia Moreno (Universitat Politècnica de València)
* Lluís Padró (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)
* Ramón López Cózar (Universidad de Granada)
* Manuel Palomar (Universitat d'Alacant)
* Ferrán Pla (Universitat Politècnica de València)
* German Rigau (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea)
* Horacio Rodríguez (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)
* Leonel Ruiz Miyares (Centro de Lingüística Aplicada de Santiago de
Cuba)
* Emilio Sanchís (Universitat Politècnica de València)
* Kepa Sarasola (Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea)

* Mariona Taulé (Universitat de Barcelona)
* L. Alfonso Ureña (Universidad de Jaén)
* Felisa Verdejo (UNED)
* Manuel Vilares (Universidad de A Coruña)
* Luis Villaseñor-Pineda (Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y
Electrónica. México)


CONTACT INFORMATION

All the information about the Conference is available in the 25th SEPLN Conference website: http://ixa2.si.ehu.es/sepln2009/ E-mail: sepln2009@ehu.es

CFP: 21st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09)

The IJCAI-09 Program Committee invites submissions of technical papers for IJCAI-09, to be held in Pasadena, CA, USA, July 11-17, 2009. Submissions are invited on significant, original, and previously unpublished research on all aspects of artificial intelligence.

The theme of IJCAI-09 is "The Interdisciplinary Reach of Artificial Intelligence," with a focus on the broad impact of artificial intelligence on science, engineering, medicine, social sciences, arts and humanities. The conference will include invited talks, workshops, tutorials, and other events dedicated to this theme.

• Important dates for authors of technical papers:
• Electronic abstract submission: January 7, 2009 (11:59PM, PST)
• Electronic paper submission: January 12, 2009 (11:59PM, PST)
• Author feedback period: March 13-16, 2009 (11:59PM, PDT). Please note: Daylight savings time starts on March 8.
• Author notification of acceptance/rejection: March 31, 2009
• Camera-ready copy due: April 14, 2009
• Technical sessions: July 13-17, 2009

Submission Details

Submitted papers must be formatted according to IJCAI guidelines and submitted electronically through the IJCAI-09 paper submission site. Full instructions for submission, including formatting guidelines and electronic templates for paper submission, are available on the IJCAI-09 website: http://www.ijcai-09.org (see the link titled Submission Details). Submitting authors will be required to register with the IJCAI-09 paper submission software (this will be linked from the IJCAI-09 website during the first week of December, 2008).

Papers may be accepted for either oral or poster presentation; papers accepted for either form of presentation will not be distinguished in the conference proceedings, nor will designation of oral or poster presentation be made on the quality of the contribution. Instead, these distinctions will be made in the interests of overall program coherence and quality.

To facilitate review, the paper title, author names, contact details, and a brief abstract must be submitted electronically by Jan. 7, 2009 (11:59 PST). No paper will be accepted for review unless an accompanying abstract is received by the deadline. Technical papers are due electronically on Jan. 12, 2009 (11:59 PST). Authors bear full responsibility for compliance with submission standards. Submissions received after the deadline or that do not meet the length or formatting requirements will not be accepted for review. No email or fax submissions will be accepted. Notification of receipt of the electronically submitted papers will be emailed to the designated contact author soon after receipt. If there are problems with the electronic submission, the program chair will contact the designated author by email. The last day for inquiries regarding lost submissions is Jan. 19, 2009. Notification of acceptance or rejection of submitted papers will be emailed to the designated author by March 31, 2009. The opportunity to respond to preliminary reviews will be made available to authors prior to this date, during the period March 13-16, 2009.

Guidelines for such responses, along with details of the reviewing process will be posted on the IJCAI-09 website. Camera-ready copy of accepted papers must be received by the publisher by April 14, 2009. Note: at least one author of each accepted paper is required to attend the conference to present the work. Authors will be required to confirm their acceptance of this requirement at the time of submission.

Authors who do not have access to the web should contact the program chair at pcchair09@ijcai.org no later than December 15, 2008 for alternate submission instructions.

Content Areas

To facilitate the reviewing process, authors will be required to choose two to four appropriate content area keywords from the list provided by the IJCAI-09 submission software, which will be part of the online paper registration process. Authors are encouraged to select the most specific keywords that accurately describe the main aspects of their contributions. General categories should only be used if specific categories do not apply or do not accurately reflect the main contributions. Each keyword is placed within one of ten 10 major themes; however, many of the keywords cut across multiple themes, and authors should feel free to select any keyword descriptive of the contribution, even if the major theme within which is it categorized is not the most appropriate. A list of keywords is appended to the end of this call.

The major themes are:

Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems
Constraints, Satisfiability, and Search
Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Logic
Machine Learning
Multidisciplinary Topics And Applications
Natural Language Processing
Planning and Scheduling
Robotics and Vision
Uncertainty in AI
Web and Knowledge-based Information Systems

Policy on Multiple Submissions

IJCAI will not accept any paper which, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. Authors are also required not to submit their papers elsewhere during IJCAI's review period. These restrictions apply only to journals and conferences, not to workshops and similar specialized presentations with a limited audience and without archival proceedings. Authors will be required to confirm that their submissions conform to these requirements at the time
of submission.

Paper Length and Format

Submitted technical papers must be no longer than six pages, including all figures and references, and must be formatted according to posted IJCAI-09 guidelines. Specifically, papers must be formatted for "letter-size" (8.5" x 11") paper, in double-column format with a 10pt font. Electronic templates for the LaTeX typesetting package, as well as a Word template, that conform to IJCAI-09 guidelines will be made available at the conference website (see above) during the first week of December, as will further details on formatting.

Authors are required to submit their electronic papers in PDF format. Files in Postscript (ps), or any other format will not be accepted.

Submitted papers must not exceed six (6) formatted pages, including references and figures. This six-page limit will be strictly enforced: over-length papers will not be considered for review. Each accepted paper will be allowed six pages in the proceedings; up to two additional pages may be purchased at a price of $275 per page. In order to make blind reviewing possible, authors must omit their names and affiliations from the paper. Also, while the references should include all published literature relevant to the paper, including previous works of the authors, it should not include unpublished works. When referring to one's own work, use the third person rather than the first person. For example, say "Previously, Foo and Bar [7] have shown that...", rather than "In our previous work [7] we have shown that..." For accepted papers, such identifying information can be added to the final camera-ready version for publication.

Review Process

Papers will be subject to blind peer review. Selection criteria include accuracy and originality of ideas, clarity and significance of results and quality of the presentation. Each paper will be assigned to three Program Committee members, one Senior Program Committee member and one Area Chair for review. The reviewing process will include a short period for the authors to view reviews and respond to technical questions on the submitted work raised by the reviewers before final decisions are made. The decision of the Program Committee will be final and cannot be appealed.

Papers accepted for the conference will be scheduled for oral or poster presentation and will be printed in the proceedings. At least one author of each accepted paper will be required to attend the conference to present the work.

Please send inquiries about paper submissions to ijcai09@aaai.org.

Inquiries about the conference program can be directed to:

Craig Boutilier
Program Chair, IJCAI-09
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON, M5S 3H5, CANADA
Email: pcchair09@ijcai.org

For further information please visit the conference web site: http://www.ijcai-09.org

List of keywords:

Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems

• Agent/AI Theories and Architectures
• Agent-based Simulation and Emergent Behavior
• Agent Communication
• Argumentation
• Auctions And Market-Based Systems
• Coordination And Collaboration
• Distributed AI
• E-Commerce
• Game Theory
• Information/Mobile/Software Agents
• Multiagent Learning
• Multiagent Planning
• Multiagent Systems (General/other)
• Negotiation And Contract-Based Systems
• Social Choice Theory

Constraints, Satisfiability, and Search

• Applications
• Constraint Optimization
• Constraint Satisfaction (General/other)
• Distributed Search/CSP/Optimization
• Dynamic Programming
• Search, SAT, CSP: Evaluation and Analysis
• Global Constraints
• Heuristic Search
• Search, SAT, CSP: Meta-heuristics
• Meta-Reasoning
• Quantifier Formulations
• Satisfiability (General/other)
• SAT and CSP: Modeling/Formulations
• Search (General/other)
• SAT and CSP: Solvers and Tools

Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Logic

• Action, Change and Causality
• Automated Reasoning and Theorem Proving
• Belief Change
• Common-Sense Reasoning
• Computational Complexity of Reasoning
• Description Logics and Ontologies
• Diagnosis and Abductive Reasoning
• Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning
• Knowledge Representation Languages
• Knowledge Representation (General/other)
• Logic Programming
• Many-Valued And Fuzzy Logics
• Nonmonotonic Reasoning
• Preferences
• Qualitative Reasoning
• Reasoning with Beliefs

Machine Learning

• Active Learning
• Case-based Reasoning
• Classification
• Cost-Sensitive Learning
• Data Mining
• Ensemble Methods
• Evolutionary Computation
• Feature Selection/Construction
• Kernel Methods
• Learning Graphical Models
• Learning Preferences/Rankings
• Learning Theory
• Machine Learning (General/other)
• Neural Networks
• Online Learning
• Reinforcement Learning
• Relational Learning
• Time-series/Data Streams
• Transfer, Adaptation, Multi-task Learning
• Semi-Supervised/Unsupervised Learning
• Structured Learning

Multidisciplinary Topics And Applications

• AI and Natural Sciences
• AI and Social Sciences
• Art And Music
• Autonomic Computing
• Cognitive Modeling
• Computational Biology
• Computer Games
• Computer-Aided Education
• Database Systems
• Philosophical and Ethical Issues
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Intelligent User Interfaces
• Interactive Entertainment
• Personalization and User Modeling
• Real-Time Systems
• Security and Privacy
• Validation and Verification

Natural-Language Processing

• Dialogue
• Discourse
• Information Extraction
• Information Retrieval
• Machine Translation
• Morphology and Phonology
• Natural Language Generation
• Natural Language Semantics
• Natural Language Summarization
• Natural Language Syntax
• Natural Language Processing (General/other)
• Psycholinguistics
• Question Answering
• Speech Recognition And Understanding
• Text Classification

Planning and Scheduling

• Activity and Plan Recognition
• Hybrid Systems
• Markov Decisions Processes
• Model-Based Reasoning
• POMDPs
• Plan Execution And Monitoring
• Plan/Workflow Analysis
• Planning Algorithms
• Planning under Uncertainty
• Planning (General/other)
• Scheduling
• Theoretical Foundations of Planning

Robotics and Vision

• Behavior And Control
• Cognitive Robotics
• Human Robot Interaction
• Localization, Mapping, State Estimation
• Manipulation
• Motion and Path Planning
• Multi-Robot Systems
• Robotics
• Sensor Networks
• Vision and Perception

Uncertainty in AI

• Approximate Probabilistic Inference
• Bayesian Networks
• Decision/Utility Theory
• Exact Probabilistic Inference
• Graphical Models
• Preference Elicitation
• Sequential Decision Making
• Uncertainty Representations
• Uncertainty in AI (General/other)

Web and Knowledge-based Information Systems

• Information Extraction
• Information Integration
• Information Retrieval
• Knowledge Acquisition
• Knowledge Engineering
• Knowledge-based Systems (General/other)
• Ontologies
• Recommender Systems
• Semantic Web
• Social Networks
• Source Wrapping
• Web Mining
• Web Search
• Web Technologies (General/other)

Call for ICML/UAI/COLT 2009 Workshop Proposals

The ICML, UAI, and COLT conferences will be colocated in Montreal June 14-21 2009. We solict proposals for workshops to be held during a single joint workshop day on June 18. This date lies between ICML (June 14-17) and UAI/COLT (June 19-21). Workshops will be selected on the basis of their interest to the attendees of one or more of the conferences.

The goal of the workshops is to provide an informal forum for researchers to discuss important research questions and challenges. Controversial issues, open problems, and comparisons of competing approaches are encouraged. Representation of alternative viewpoints and panel-style discussions are also encouraged.

Organization

The format, style, and content of accepted workshops is under the control of the workshop organizers and largely autonomous from the main conferences. The workshops will be seven hours long and split into morning and afternoon sessions. Workshop organizers will be expected to manage the workshop content, specify the workshop format, be present to moderate the discussion and panels, invite experts in the domain, and maintain a website for the workshop. Workshop registration will be handled centrally by the main conferences with a single uniform registration fee and with registrants allowed to attend workshops other than the one they register for.

Submission Instructions

Proposals should specify clearly all of the following:

• the workshop's title (what is it called?)
• topic (what is it about?)
• motivation (why a workshop on this topic?)
• impact and expected outcomes (what will having the workshop do?)
• potential invited speakers (who might come?)
• a list of related publications (where can we learn more?)
• main workshop organizer (who is making it happen?)
• other organizers (who else is making it happen?)
• workshop URL (where will interested parties get more information?)
• relevant conferences (which of ICML, UAI, and COLT would it appeal to?)

Please also provide brief CVs of all organizers. This information should be sent by email (in plain text or pdf format) to Icml-uai-colt-workshops09@ssli.ee.washington.edu by 19 Jan 2009.

ICML 2008 Call for Papers

The 26th International Conference On Machine Learning (ICML-2009)
June 14-18, 2009, Montreal, Canada

This call for papers extends the preliminary call by including the conference website, icml2009.org, and the list of area chairs and topic descriptors, www.cs.rutgers.edu/~mlittman/icml09/ac.html . Please browse the list of area chairs to get a sense of the scope and coverage of this year's conference. We encourage a broad range of submissions!

ICML 2009 invites submission of engagingly written papers on substantial, original, and previously unpublished research in *all* aspects of machine learning. We welcome submissions of innovative work on systems that are self adaptive, systems that improve their own performance, or systems that apply logical, statistical, probabilistic or other formalisms to the analysis of data, to the learning of predictive models, or to interaction with the environment. We welcome innovative applications, theoretical contributions, carefully evaluated empirical studies, and we particularly welcome work that combines all of these elements. We also encourage submissions that bridge the gap between machine learning and other fields of research. ICML 2009 will be held in Montreal, Canada, June 14-18, 2009, and will be co-located with the Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence Conference (UAI), and the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT), and Multidisciplinary Symposium on Reinforcement Learning (MSRL).

DATES (Note slightly earlier schedule than 2008):

• January 26: Full paper submissions due (no separate abstract date)
• February 27: First round reviews available
• March 10: Author responses due
• April 6: Acceptance notification
• April 20: Final camera-ready version due
• June 14: ICML Tutorials
• June 15-17 ICML Conference
• June 18: Joint Workshops Day, ICML/UAI/COLT; MSRL
  

Format of the Conference

The conference will include three days of technical presentations, one day of tutorials and one day of workshops. Accepted papers will each have an oral presentation as well as a poster in an evening poster session. There will also be talks by several invited speakers and a banquet.

Awards

Awards will be given for Best Paper(s), Best Student Paper(s) (first-authored by a student), Best Application Paper, 10-year Best Paper (most influential paper of ICML 1999).

Submission

Submission format, details and style files will soon be available on the ICML 2009 website (icml2009.org). Submission of papers and the management of the paper reviewing process will be entirely electronic.

Review Process (New for 2009!)

Our review process this year will be slightly different from previous years to further encourage innovative papers on a variety of topics. Authors will indicate a preference for an area chair to handle their papers via an inverse bidding process. It is crucial for authors to familiarize themselves with the 2009 area chairs and their topic descriptiors (http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~mlittman/icml09/ac.html). The goal is to ensure each submission is considered by reviewers appropriate to the paper's intended contribution. Each submitted paper will receive two first round reviews. As in recent years, authors will have the opportunity to see and respond to the reviews before a final decision is made. Papers that receive at least one positive review in the first round will receive one or more additional reviews. Final decisions will be made using the input from all reviewers, the author feedback, the assigned area chair, and programme co-chairs. Reviewing for ICML 2009 will be blind to the identities of the authors. No conditional accepts will be granted this year.

ICML 2009 will not accept any paper that is substantially similar to another paper that is currently under review or has already been accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. The programme co-chairs will consider making an exception for papers published in substantially disjoint communities (application conferences, for example), as long as the submitted papers are themselves clearly targeted to a machine-learning audience. Please clearly indicate which contributions are novel and which are previous work, either by the authors or others. If a paper submitted to ICML 2009 and another already published or already submitted paper contain substantial overlap in content and the content is not clearly indicated (anonymously) as being previous work, then the ICML submission may be rejected on the grounds of being a dual submission.

Similarly, authors must withdraw their papers if they submit an overlapping paper elsewhere during ICML's review period.

With your help, we expect another excellent conference!

-The ICML2009 Organizational Team


General Chair:
Andrea Danyluk (Williams College)
Programme co-chairs:
Leon Bottou (NEC Research)
Michael Littman (Rutgers University)
Local Arrangements Chair:
Doina Precup (McGill University)

Second Web People Search Evaluation Workshop

Second Web People Search Evaluation Workshop
Call for Participation
http://nlp.uned.es/weps

Finding information about people in the World Wide Web is one of the most common activities of Internet users. Person names, however, are highly ambiguous. In most cases, the results for a person name search are a mix of pages about different people sharing the same name. The user is then forced either to add terms to the query (probably losing recall and focusing on one single aspect of the person), or to browse every document in order to filter the information about the person he/she is actually looking for. In an ideal system the user would simply type a person name, and receive search results clustered according to the different people sharing that name.

In 2007 the Web People Search Task (Artiles et al. 2007) was the first competitive evaluation focused on this problem. The 16 participating systems received a set of web pages for a person name, and they had to cluster them into different entities. This second evaluation provides a new testbed corpus, improved evaluation metrics, and an additional attribute extraction subtask.

* Task definitions

** Clustering

In this task systems receive as input a set of web search results obtained when performing a query for an (ambiguous) person name. The expected output is a clustering of the web pages, where each cluster is assumed to contain all (and only those) pages that refer to the same individual.

** Attribute Extraction

This subtask consists of extracting 18 kinds of "attribute values" for target individuals whose names appear on each of the provided Web pages. The organizers will distribute the target Web pages in their original format (i.e., html), and the participant systems have to extract attribute values from each page.

** Complete guidelines and data

• Clustering task guideline
  
• Attribute Extraction task guideline
  
• Training/development data
  

* Participation

The clustering and the attribute extraction task will be regarded as two separate subtasks, and therefore a team can choose to participate in only one or both of them. The organizers will provide annotated data for developing/training systems. On a second stage, an unannotated corpus will be distributed, systems output will be collected and evaluation results returned to the participants. Each team can submit up to five runs. Every team is expected to write a paper describing their system and discussing the evaluation results.

* How do I register ?

Please send an email expressing your interest to the task organizers (weps-organizers@lsi.uned.es).

* Important Dates

• October 2008: Distribute the training data + CFP
• December 1-8, 2008: Evaluation
• December 17, 2008: Return the evaluation result
• February 2009: Papers due.
• April 2x, 2009: Workshop in Madrid.

* Workshop Organizers

• Satoshi Sekine, Proteus Project (NYU).
• Javier Artiles, NLP & IR Group (UNED).
• Julio Gonzalo, NLP & IR Group (UNED).

* Program Committee

• Eneko Agirre, UBC
• Breck Balwin, Alias-i
• Andrew Borthwick, Spock
• Jeremy Ellman, Northumbria University
• Donna Harman, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
• Eduard Hovy, ISI
• Dmitri Kalashnikov, University of California, Irvine
• Paul Kalmar, Fair Issac
• Bernardo Magnini, FBK-irst, Italy
• Gideon Mann, Google
• Yutaka Matsuo, Tokyo University
• Manabu Okumura, Tokyo Inst. of Tech.
• Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota
• Massimo Poesio, University of Essex
• Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam
• Mark Sanderson, University of Sheffield
• Arjen P. de Vries, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica

Updated information about the task can be found at the WePS web site (http://nlp.uned.es/weps)

CFPS on Social Networks

In recent months, I've been developing software for my new company, a social network for videogamers, Wipley. That has awaken interests on all the stuff related to Social Network analysis. Last days, I've received a couple of call for papers related to this topic, that seems very interesting:

• Call for papers: 3rd International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.
• Call for book chapters: Computational Social Network Analysis: Trends, Tools and Research Advance.

Workshop on Machine Learning Open Source 2008

I like Open Access and Open Software, in fact, I'm meber of the local LUG of my University (GLUEM) and some of my posts are refered to these topics. In ML-News list, I've seen a call for submissiones for the a Workshop on Machine Learning Open Source (MLOSS), that will be held at NIPS, December 12th. I this this kind of workshops are a very good idea to promote the use of Open Software in ML, and give extra benefits to those developers that let the community use their software, allowing other researchers a faster development of their experiments.

The NIPS workshop on Workshop on Machine Learning Open Source Software (MLOSS) will held in Whistler (B.C.) on the 12th of December, 2008.

Important Dates
===============

* Submission Date: October 1st, 2008
* Notification of Acceptance: October 14th, 2008
* Workshop date: December 12 or 13th, 2008


Call for Contributions
======================

The organizing committee is currently seeking abstracts for talks at MLOSS 2008. MLOSS is a great opportunity for you to tell the community about your use, development, or philosophy of open source software in machine learning. This includes (but is not limited to) numeric packages (as e.g. R,octave,numpy), machine learning toolboxes and implementations of ML-algorithms. The committee will select several submitted abstracts for 20-minute talks. The submission process is very simple:

* Tag your mloss.org project with the tag nips2008

* Ensure that you have a good description (limited to 500 words)

* Any bells and whistles can be put on your own project page, and of course provide this link on mloss.org

On 1 October 2008, we will collect all projects tagged with nips2008 for review.

Note: Projects must adhere to a recognized Open Source License (cf. http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ ) and the source code must have been released at the time of submission. Submissions will be reviewed based on the status of the project at the time of the
submission deadline.


Description
===========

We believe that the wide-spread adoption of open source software policies will have a tremendous impact on the field of machine learning. The goal of this workshop is to further support the current developments in this area and give new impulses to it. Following the success of the inaugural NIPS-MLOSS workshop held at NIPS 2006, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) has started a new track for machine learning open source software initiated by the workshop's organizers. Many prominent machine learning researchers have co-authored a position paper advocating the need for open source software in machine learning. Furthermore, the workshop's organizers have set up a community website mloss.org where people can register
their software projects, rate existing projects and initiate discussions about projects and related topics. This website currently lists 123 such projects including many prominent projects in the area of machine learning.

The main goal of this workshop is to bring the main practitioners in the area of machine learning open source software together in order to initiate processes which will help to further improve the development of this area. In particular, we have to move beyond a mere collection of more or less unrelated software projects and provide a common foundation to stimulate cooperation and interoperability between different projects. An important step in this direction will be a common data exchange format such that different methods can exchange their results more easily.

This year's workshop sessions will consist of three parts.

* We have two invited speakers: John Eaton, the lead developer of Octave and John Hunter, the lead developer of matplotlib.

* Researchers are invited to submit their open source project to present it at the workshop.

* In discussion sessions, important questions regarding the future development of this area will be discussed. In particular, we will discuss what makes a good machine learning software project and how to improve interoperability between programs. In addition, the question of how to deal with data sets and reproducibility will also be addressed.

Taking advantage of the large number of key research groups which attend NIPS, decisions and agreements taken at the workshop will have the potential to significantly impact the future of machine learning software.


Invited Speakers
================

* John D. Hunter - Main author of matplotlib.

* John W. Eaton - Main author of Octave.


Tentative Program
=================

The 1 day workshop will be a mixture of talks (including a mandatory demo of the software) and panel/open/hands-on discussions.

Morning session: 7:30am - 10:30am

* Introduction and overview
* Octave (John W. Eaton)
* Contributed Talks
* Discussion: What is a good mloss project?
o Review criteria for JMLR mloss
o Interoperable software
o Test suites

Afternoon session: 3:30pm - 6:30pm

* Matplotlib (John D. Hunter)
* Contributed Talks
* Discussion: Reproducible research
o Data exchange standards
o Shall datasets be open too? How to provide access to data sets.
o Reproducible research, the next level after UCI datasets.


Program Committee
=================

* Jason Weston (NEC Princeton, USA)
* Gunnar Rätsch (FML Tuebingen, Germany)
* Lieven Vandenberghe (University of California LA, USA)
* Joachim Dahl (Aalborg University, Denmark)
* Torsten Hothorn (Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich, Germany)
* Asa Ben-Hur (Colorado State University, USA)
* William Stafford Noble (Department of Genome Sciences Seattle, USA)
* Klaus-Robert Mueller (Fraunhofer Institute First, Germany)
* Geoff Holmes (University of Waikato, New Zealand)
* Alain Rakotomamonjy (University of Rouen, France)


Organizers
==========

* Soeren Sonnenburg
Fraunhofer FIRST Kekuléstr. 7, 12489 Berlin, Germany

* Mikio Braun
Technische Universität Berlin, Franklinstr. 28/29, FR 6-9, 10587
Berlin, Germany

* Cheng Soon Ong
ETH Zürich, Universitätstr. 6, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland


Funding
=======

The workshop is supported by PASCAL (Pattern Analysis, Statistical Modelling and Computational Learning)