Theory, methods and applications of social networks

Theory, methods and applications of social networks

***3th edition of the SUMMER COURSE - Theory, methods and applications of social networks. Dynamic Analysis with SIENA (3 ECTS).

6th - 10th July 2009, Computer Lab 33, Facultat de Lletres - Psicología - UAB.

This 3th edition of the international summer course is intended to graduate students, researchers or professionals interested in an introduction to the theory and methods of social networks and especially in dynamic analysis of social networks with SIENA. The sessions will be both in Spanish and English, except the SIENA workshop, mainly in English. At the end of each session participants should complete a task and send it to professors. The last session is devoted to presentations by participants. The participants who complete the scheduled tasks will get an official recognition of credits.

People interest have to send their vitae and their interest or research problem to gr.egoredes@uab.es

More information: www.egoredes.net > summer course

DAMIEN: DAta MIning for the EvolviNg Web

DAMIEN: DAta MIning for the EvolviNg Web

Workshop held in conjunction with the
13th East European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS2009)

September 7th 2009, Riga, Latvia.

http://oswinds.csd.auth.gr/DAMIEN09/

The Web evolves in many distinct ways: ét grows daily, it revolutionizes information circulation, it disseminates knowledge, it demands on the spot data management. Its role for people shifts gradually from that of a huge information source to that of a social environment. The topics discussed by people, the products preferred by them and the social networks to which they participate are also subject to constant change, as proven from the fast emergence of the Web 2.0 technologies.

This workshop is devoted to methods, techniques and practices for analyzing evolution in the Web. Data mining for the evolving Web world is indispensable for business applications.
The success of a recommendation engine depends on the validity of the models it builds upon and which are bound to a constant change as new products, new competitors and new spammers enter the market.
The behaviour and the interests of users change as the Web becomes more accessible to new social strata, as new social trends manifest themselves, as new languages for blogging and querying gain momentum and as people embrace new technologies for information exchange, collaborative tagging and social activities.
The evolving Web poses grand challenges to data analysis: Data about Web usage arrive as streams, data describing Web content evolve with respect to topics and terminology, meta-information is context-rich and ephemeral, preferences of users change in response to external influences, coming among else from their evolving social networks. In this workshop, we foster research advances on data mining methods, techniques and practices for analyzing evolving user behaviour and preferences, evolving content and evolving communities, and we strongly encourage the interchange of ideas among scholars that study evolution in the Web from different perspectives.

Topics of interest to DAMIEN’09 include, but are not limited to:

• Web data mining methodologies, techniques and practices
• evolving data analysis techniques
• user behaviour and preferences
• Web graph mining
• evolving content management
• Web 2.0 and social data mining
• Meta-information exploitation and knowledge extraction
• Evolving social networks.


Important dates

April 27, 2009: paper Submission deadline June 1, 2009: Notification of Workshop paper acceptance June 15, 2009: Submission deadline for camera-ready papers September 7, 2009: Workshop date


Paper submission and presentation

The submission should be formatted according to Springer-Verlag requirements which are summarized at ADBIS 2009 submission requirements (www.adbis2009.org). Information for LNCS Authors can be found at http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0
All prospective authors are asked to submit an electronic copy of their manuscript according to submission timetable through the following web site (EasyChair system):
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=damien2009.
Each paper will be reviewed by at least two Program Committee members.
Final papers shall not contain more than 8 pages in the format specified by Springer. Best papers accepted for publication will be published in the LNCS series of Springer Verlag, the others – in the ADBIS workshops proceedings.
presentation schedule : 15 min – presentation; 5 min – questions and comments

Chairs
Athena Vakali, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (avakali@csd.auth.gr)
Myra Spilopoulou, Otto-von-Guericke-Universitat Magdeburg, Germany (myra@iti.cs.uni-magdeburg.de)
Ernestina Menasalvas, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain (emenasalvas@fi.upm.es)

Program Committee (tentative)
Joao Gama, University of Porto, Portugal
Dimitris Katsaros, University of Thessaly, Greece
Ioannis Kompatsiaris, CERTH/ITI, Greece
Themis Palpanas, University of Trento, Italy
Yucel Saygin, Sabanci University, Turkey
Evimaria Terzi, IBM Almaden, USA

PROLEARN Academy Newsletter 2009 - Week 9

*** News

WiCOM 2009 Call for Papers: Sept. 24-26, 2009, Beijing, China--zjh
Posted on: Feb 19, 2009


There is additional information in http://www.prolearn-academy.org/News


*** Events in the next 7 days

Software ENgineering within Social software Environments
Place: Kaiserslautern, Date: Mar 03, 2009


There is additional information in http://www.prolearn-academy.org/Events


*** PROLEARN Academy - Measure

Our auto observation tool for scientific communities contains at present 1527 projects, of which 235 are newsfeeds, 95 newsletters, 488 web sites, 68 mailinglists and 641 blogs. The number of caught entries totals 110498 for the feeds, of which 4832 were retrieved last week. For the newsletters totals 3449 entries, of which 19 were retrieved last week, for the mailinglists there are 97570 entries, of which 493 last week and for the blogs there are 214710 entries, of which 651 last week.

There is additional information about the projects in http://www.prolearn-academy.org/mediabase

We are continuously enlarging our project database.

Programme for oftware ENgineering within Social software Environments (SENSE09) available

International Workshop on
Software ENgineering within Social software Environments (SENSE09)

Kaiserslautern, Germany, March 3, 2009
http://www.prolearn-academy.org/Events/sense09

in conjunction with the Conference on Software Engineering (SE2009)
Kaiserlautern, Germany, March 2-6, 2009
http://www.se2009.de/

Held together with Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing in Software Development Teams

PROGRAMME

09:00 - 09:15 – Opening & Welcome Remarks (Workshop Chairs)

09:15 - 10:30 – Session I: Collaboration in Software Engineering (Chair: Walid Maalej)

1. “Supporting Software Development Teams with a Semantic Process- and Artifact-oriented Collaboration Environment” (Sebastian Weber, Andreas Emrich, Jörg Broschart, Eric Ras and Özgür Uenalan)
   Full Paper
2. "Enabling Social Network Analysis in Distributed Collaborative Software Development" (Tommi Kramer, Tobias Hildenbrand, Thomas Acker)
   Full paper
3. "Playful Cleverness revisited: open-source game development as a method for teaching software engineering" (Mart Laanpere, Kaido Kikkas)
   Short paper

10:30 - 11:00 – Coffee Break

11:00 - 12:30 – Session II: Web 2.0 and Software Engineering (Chair: Anna Hannemann)


4. "Web 2.0 artefacts in SME-networks – A qualitative approach towards an integrative conceptualization considering organizational and technical perspectives" (Nadine Blinn, Nadine Lindermann, Katrin Fäcks, Sylvia Valcárcel, Markus Nüttgens, Harald von Kortzfleisch)
   Full paper
5. "Investigating the Suitability of Web X.Y Features for Software Engineers" (Eric Ras, Jörg Rech, Sebastian Weber) - Ein Überblick über Features von WebX.Y und wie und wann diese während der Software Entwicklung eingesetzt werden können.
   Full paper
6. "A method for identifying unobvious requirements in globally distributed software projects" (Smita Ghaisas)
   Full paper

12:30 - 14:00 – Lunch Break

14:00 - 14:30 – Demo Session : Community-Driven Requirements Elicitation (Chair: Hans-Jörg Happel)


7. “A Web Platform for Social Requirements Engineering” (Steffen Lohmann, Sebastian Dietzold, Philipp Heim and Norman Heino)
   Introductory Talk + Demo
8. "Community Driven Elicitation of Requirements with Entertaining Social Software" (Anna Hannemann, Christian Hocken, Ralf Klamma)
   Introductory Talk + Demo

14:30 - 15:30 – Session III: Knowledge Sharing in Software Engineering (Chair: Steffen Lohmann)


9. "Communication is the key Support Durable Knowledge Sharing in Software Engineering by Microblogging" (Wolfgang Reinhardt)
   Full paper
10. “Improving Knowledge Sharing in Distributed Teams By Capturing and Recommending Informal Experiences” (Happel Hans-Jörg and Walid Maalej)
    Short paper
11. “Annals of Knowledge Sharing in Distributed Software Development Environments: Experience from Open Source Software Projects” (Sulayman K. Sowe, Rishab A. Ghosh and Luc Soete)
    Short paper

15:30 - 16:00 – Coffee Break and Poster Session

16:00 – 17:00 – Round Table

17.00 - 17.30 – Summary & Final Remarks

Data Mining in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

Call For Papers Session on Data Mining in the Social and Behavioral Sciences

The 2009 International Conference on Data Mining WORLDCOMP'09 The 2009 World Congress in
Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing
July 13-16, 2009, Las Vegas, USA

Data mining is used extensively in Business. However, there is also a role for data mining the vast data collections of the social and behavioral sciences. At colleges and universities alone in 2003, more than $2.4 billion were spent on social science research and development. This investment represents not only a financial expenditure, but also the expenditure of countless hours, days, weeks, and months of researcher, participant, and administrator time and effort and other exertions. The results of this immense investment are often embodied in extensive data sets such as the General Social Survey, which has collected data on contemporary American society and attitudes approximately every two years since 1975; the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, which has gathered information on crime levels and law enforcement administration, operation, and management in the U.S. since 1930; and the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, which has followed about 11,000 students who completed their baccalaureate degree in 1992-93 to assess their education and work experience.

Minimally, crass efficiency demands reasonable output from this substantial input into research and development. But the challenge accepted by these and other social investigators, which is reflected in mission statements such as the National Science Foundation’s objective “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…” is greater than simple efficiency. The challenge is to resolve important issues, often calling for high risk, high payoff research. In these endeavors, large quantities of data often are collected, some of which may contain the keys to resolving important social issues but remain inaccessible due to the mass of data. In some sense, then, there is an ethical imperative to exploit these data to their fullest extent.

Data mining is a method to exploit more efficiently the large quantity of social science data. Data mining is interdisciplinary in nature, spanning across such fields machine learning, database, data warehousing, statistics, knowledge management, and visualization.

Data mining is a process of inductively analyzing data to assess known relationships as well as to find interesting patterns and unknown relationships. The term “data mining” encompasses a number of techniques and involves both human and computational resources. The techniques are used not only to predict the outcome of a future event but also to provide knowledge about the structure and interrelationships among data. The data mining process identifies relationships using techniques such as classification rules, association rules, clustering, and decision trees. Classification and association mining algorithms are used to create models that describe existing data and relationships within the data. Both methodologies create rules used to analyze new data and to predict future outcomes for cases with a set of common characteristics. Classification analysis also constructs a decision tree model, which is an analytical technique that is both predictive and explanatory.

Original, high-quality papers are sought for this session on Data Mining in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Papers may cover any aspect of data mining applications and methodologies as they apply to fields such as:

* Political Science
* Social Work
* Health Science
* Child Development
* Anthropology
* Communication
* Criminal Justice
* Economics
* Education
* Film
* History
* Nursing
* Psychology
* Recreation and Leisure
* Sociology

The application of current or newly developed data mining techniques used in the social or behavioral sciences may include, but are not restricted to the following:

* Apriori algorithm
* Association Mining
* Bayesian classification
* Classification by decision tree induction
* Classification Mining
* Classification with neural networks
* Clustering
* Comparison of data mining and machine learning
* Comparison of data mining and statistical methods
* Correlation and other interestingness measures
* Data and Web Warehouses
* Data Cleaning
* Data integration
* Data integration and transformation
* Data mining architecture
* Data reduction
* Document Clustering and Visualization
* Frequent pattern growth algorithms
* Hierarchical clustering
* Indexing Schemes
* Information Extraction From Unstructured or Semi-Structured Data
* Internet and Web Data Mining
* Knowledge Discovery in Databases
* Knowledge Management
* Machine Learning
* Metadata Use and Management
* Mining Heterogeneous Data or Systems
* Multidimensional Data Models
* Multidimensional Query Languages and Query Optimization
* Multimedia Information Systems
* Partitional clustering
* Pattern Discovery and Pattern Mining
* Personalized Content Filtering
* Prediction and other classification techniques
* Probability based clustering
* Semi-Structured Data Analysis
* Structure Mining
* Text Mining

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS:

Authors are invited to submit their draft papers to the session chair at ascime@brockport.edu.
Submissions must be received by Feb. 25, 2009 and they must be in MS doc format (5 to 7 pages - single space, font size of 10 to 12).
Camera-Ready papers (if accepted)c will be limited to 7 (IEEE style) pages. One author is expected to attend the conference and present the paper.

Papers must not have been previously published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. The first page of the paper should include: title of the paper, name, affiliation, postal address, and email address for each author. The first page should also identify the name of the Contact Author and a maximum of 5 topical keywords that would best represent the content of the paper. Finally, the name of the conference and session (The 2009 International Conference on Data Mining, Session on Data Mining in the Social and Behavioral Sciences) must be stated on the first page.

Papers will be evaluated for originality, significance, clarity, impact, and soundness. Each paper will be refereed by at least two experts in the field.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Feb. 25, 2009 (Wed.): Submission of papers (about 5 to 7 pages) to ascime@brockport.edu
Mar. 25, 2009 (Wed.): Notification of acceptance
Apr. 25, 2009 (Sat.): Camera-Ready papers and Registration due
Jul. 13 – 16, 2009 (Mon. – Thur.): WORLDCOMP'09 with 22 joint conferences


LOCATION OF CONFERENCES:

The conferences will be held in the Monte Carlo hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (with any overflows at other near-by hotels). This is a mega hotel with excellent conference facilities and over 3,000 rooms. It is minutes from the airport with 24-hour shuttle service to and from the airport. This hotel has many recreational attractions, including: waterfalls, spa, pools, sunning decks, Easy River, wave pool, lighted tennis courts, health spa, nightly shows, and a number of restaurants. The negotiated room rate for conference attendees is very reasonable. The hotel is within walking distance from most other attractions.

IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies vol 1 issues no. 3 and 4 have been published

IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies

TLT vol 1 issues no. 3 and 4 have been published, the table of contents for both issues is enclosed.

IEEE TLT is publishing archival quality papers on all aspects of advances in learning technologies. In order to best serve the community, TLT is published online, using a delayed open-access policy under which paying subscribers and per-article purchasers have access to newly published content, and then 12 months after the publication of each issue, all readers will have access to the content, free of charge.

IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies is seeking papers, which either describe original research or offer a critical review of the state of the art in a particular area. For more information and submissions see http://www.computer.org/tlt/

Wolfgang Nejdl and Peter Brusilovsky
Editors-in-Chief


Transactions on Learning Technologies
July-September 2008 (vol. 1 no. 3)
http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/transactions/tlt#3

EIC Editorial
Wolfgang Nejdl
Peter Brusilovsky
Transaction on Learning Technologies 1:3 (2008) pp. 144-144

----------

Browsing within Lecture Videos Based on the Chain Index of Speech Transcription
http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/TLT.2008.22
Transaction on Learning Technologies 1:3 (2008) pp. 145-156 Stephan Repp Andreas Groß Christoph Meinel

----------

Group Scribbles to Support Knowlegde Building in Jigsaw Method http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2008.20
Transaction on Learning Technologies 1:3 (2008) pp. 157-164 Chee-Kit Loi Chiu-Pin Lin Kuo-Ping Liu

----------

Student Authentication for Oral Assessment in Distance Learning Programs
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.2
Transaction on Learning Technologies 1:3 (2008) pp. 165-175 Barry Hyes John V. Ringwood

----------

Automatic Trap Detection: A Debugging Mechanism for Abnormal Specifiacation in the IMS Sequencing Controls
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.1
Transaction on Learning Technologies 1:3 (2008) pp. 176-189 Freya H. Lin Timothy K. Shih

----------

ReST-Based Web Access to Learning Design Services
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2008.21
Transaction on Learning Technologies 1:3 (2008) pp. 190-195 Juan Manuel Dodero Ernie Ghiglione


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

Transactions on Learning Technologies
October-December 2008 (vol. 1. no. 4)
http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/transactions/tlt#3

EIC Editorial: Vision Issue
Wolfgang Nejdl
Peter Brusilovsky
pp. 198

----------

Toward Social Learning Enviroments
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.4
Transaction on Learning Technologies 1:4 (2008) pp. 199-214 Julita Vassileva

----------

Lifelong Learner Modeling for Lifelong Personalized Pervasive Learning
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.9
Transaction on Learning Technologies 1:4 (2008) pp. 215-228 Judy Kay

----------

On the Role of Technical Standards for Learning Technologies
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.6
Transaction on Learning Technologies 1:4 (2008) pp. 229-234 Erik Duval Katrien Verbert

---------

Video Collaboratories for Research and Education: An Analysis of Collaboration Design Patterns
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.5
Transaction on Learning Technologies 1:4 (2008) pp. 235-247 Roy Pea Robb Lindgren

---------

Knowing, Communication and Experiencing through Body and Emotion
http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.3
Transaction on Learning Technologies 1:4 (2008) pp. 248-259 Kristina Höök

Social Media Analytics: Understanding the Pulse of the Society

Call for Papers

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man &Cybernetics, Part A

Special Issue

Social Media Analytics: Understanding the Pulse of the Society

The Internet, Web 2.0, and computer-mediated communications (blogs, forums, social networking sites) have made citizen-, user-, and consumer-generated contents a tremendous asset for understanding various social phenomena, from extremism to social activism, and from consumer sentiment to marketing intelligence. The topic is positioned right at the intersection of humans and systems.

The special issue will seek advanced modeling and simulation, human organizational interactions, web spidering, digital archiving, cyber archeology, social network analysis, sentiment analysis, and data/text/web mining techniques and methodologies which can contribute to understanding the pulse of the society. Advanced computational and modeling methods and relevant system-oriented case studies are sought. Selected topics will include:

* Metrics and analytical tools for evaluation of social media, social interactions, and social activities
* Social media content spidering, collection, and archiving
* Modeling and simulation of social interactions
* Human-system interaction for social activities
* Cyber archeology and anthropology
* Web 2.0 and web mining for social activities
* Understanding fads and infectious ideas through social media
* Web sentiment analysis and trend prediction
* Cyber terrorism, extremism, and activism study
* Consumer-generated media analysis
* Marketing intelligence analytics and online brand communities
* Company, brand, and product sentiment analysis
* Public health and consumer health web surveillance

Important Dates:

Paper submission due: August 1, 2009
Completion of first-round review: December 1, 2009
Revised manuscript due: March 1, 2010
Final decision notification: May 1, 2010
Final version of the manuscript due: July 1, 2010

Guest Editors:

Hsinchun Chen, University of Arizona
Email: hchen@eller.arizona.edu

Christopher C. Yang, Drexel University
Email: chris.yang@ischool.drexel.edu

All papers should be submitted in PDF format to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/smca-ieee and the authors should state in their submission that “This manuscript is submitted for the special issue on Social Media Analytics: Understanding the Pulse of the Society (editors: H. Chen and C. C. Yang)”

All enquiries on this special issue should be sent to chris.yang@ischool.drexel.edu.

11th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD)

Call For Papers

11th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD)
July 8-10, 2009, Aalborg, Denmark

http://sstd09.cs.aau.dk/

HIGHLIGHTS:
-----------
* Three invited talks
* Demo session
* SSTD advanced seminars
* Best paper award
* Extended versions of best papers invited to Geoinformatica

INTRODUCTION:
-------------
SSTD 2009 will be the eleventh of a series of biannual events that discuss new and exciting research in spatio-temporal data management and related technologies. Previous symposia were held in Santa Barbara (1989), Zurich (1991), Singapore (1993), Portland (1995), Berlin (1997), Hong Kong (1999), Los Angeles (2001), Santorini, Greece (2003), Angra dos Reis, Brazil (2005), and Boston (2007).
The primary focus of SSTD symposia is on original results in the areas of theoretical foundations, design, implementation, and applications of spatial and temporal database technology. SSTD also welcomes experience reports from application specialists and the commercial community that describe lessons learned in the development, operation, and maintenance of actual systems in practical and innovative applications. The goal is to exchange research ideas and results which will initially contribute to the academic arena, but may also benefit the commercial community in the near future and encourage a dialog between practitioners and researchers.

RESEARCH PAPERS:
----------------
Authors are invited to submit electronically original research contributions or experience reports not concurrently submitted elsewhere. Submitted papers will be refereed by at least three reviewers for quality, correctness, originality, and relevance. Similar to the previous symposia, accepted papers will be published by Springer as Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). The space limit for full papers is 18 pages LNCS style.
Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, the following as they relate to spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal databases:
Data Types and Query Languages
Database Design and Conceptual Modeling
Data Stream Technologies
Continuous Monitoring of Spatial Queries
Design of Experiments, Benchmarks and Performance Evaluation
Experiences with Real Applications and Systems
Management of Moving Objects
Novel and Challenging Applications
Ontologies and Taxonomies
Critical Evaluation of Standards Proposals
Parallel and Distributed Database Systems
Query Optimization Techniques, Query Processing and Indexing
Geographic Information Retrieval
Requirements Analysis for Applications
Security and Integrity
Privacy and Trust in Data Publishing
Similarity in the Spatial and Temporal Context
Aspects of Mobile Computing and Sensor Networks
Data and the Web
Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery and Stream Databases
Data Warehousing and Decision Support
Uncertainty and Imprecision
Aspects of Social and Recommendation Systems
Use of Spatio-Temporal Data for Simulation
User Interfaces and Visualization

AWARDS:
-------
An award will be given to the best paper. In addition, the authors of best papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their work to a special issue of Geoinformatica for selected papers from SSTD 2009.

DEMONSTRATIONS:
---------------
SSTD 2009 welcomes submissions of short papers, describing demonstrations of systems (developed or under development) related to the topics of interest. The selection criteria for the demonstration proposals evaluation include: the novelty, the technical advances and challenges, and the overall practical attractiveness of the demonstrated system. Accepted contributions will be presented at a special demo session during the symposium.

Submissions should be within four pages in LNCS format (which will be included in the proceedings), describing the scientific background, plus one page that describes the nature of the demonstration that will be given at SSTD. A submission should include:
* motivation for the demonstrated concepts,
* information about the technology and the system to be demonstrated (including a system description, functionality and figures when applicable),
* justification of the system's significance

SSTD ADVANCED SEMINARS:
-----------------------
This new addition to the SSTD program will feature 3 half-day tutorials on state-of-the-art topics within spatio-temporal data management, held by distinguished international researchers. The exact choice of speakers and topics is yet to be determined, but likely topics include spatio-temporal modeling, indexing and query processing of spatio-temporal data, and spatio-temporal data mining and knowledge discovery. The targeted audience includes both doctoral students and more experienced researchers within the area. The seminars will be held on July 6 and 7, 2009.

IMPORTANT DATES:
----------------
* February 27, 2009: Abstracts due
* March 6, 2009: Paper submissions due
* April 27, 2009: Notification of acceptance
* May 5, 2009: Camera-ready papers due
Please submit all manuscripts to the submission site <http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sstd2009>.

ORGANIZATION COMMITTEE:
-----------------------
General chair:
Torben Bach Pedersen, Aalborg University
General co-chair:
Kristian Torp, Aalborg University
PC co-chairs:
Nikos Mamoulis, University of Hong Kong
Thomas Seidl, RWTH Aachen University
Steering Committee liaison:
Christian S. Jensen, Aalborg University and Google Inc.
Proceedings chair:
Ira Assent, Aalborg University
Web chair:
Man Lung (Ken) Yiu, Aalborg University
Publicity chair:
Hua Lu, Aalborg University


PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
------------------
Walid Aref, Purdue U, USA
Lars Arge, U of Aarhus, Denmark
Spiridon Bakiras, City U New York, USA
Claudio Bettini, U di Milano, Italy
Thomas Brinkhoff, FH Oldenburg, Germany
Reynold Cheng, Hong Kong U, China
Hakan Ferhatosmanoglu, Ohio State U, USA
Ralf Hartmut Güting, Fernuniv. Hagen, Germany
Marios Hadjieleftheriou, ATT Labs, USA
Erik Hoel, ESRI, USA
Panos Kalnis, National U of Singapore
George Kollios, Boston U, USA
Peer Kröger, LMU Munich, Germany
Ki-Joune Li, Pusan National U, South Korea
Yannis Manolopoulos, Aristotle U, Thessaloniki, Greece
Mohamed Mokbel, U of Minnesota, USA
Kyriakos Mouratidis, Singapore Management U, Singapore
Mirco Nanni, ISTI-CNR PISA, Italy
Enrico Nardelli, U di Roma "Tor Vergata", Italy
Mario Nascimento, U of Alberta, Canada
Dimitris Papadias, HKUST Hong Kong, China
Spiros Papadimitriou, IBM T.J. Watson, USA
Matthias Renz, LMU Munich, Germany
Philippe Rigaux, U Dauphine, France
Markus Schneider, U of Florida, USA
Bernhard Seeger, U of Marburg, Germany
Timos Sellis, IMIS/RC "Athena" and NTUA, Greece
Cyrus Shahabi, USC, California, USA
Shashi Shekhar, U of Minnesota, USA
Richard Snodgrass, U of Arizona, USA
Kian-Lee Tan, National U of Singapore
Yufei Tao, Chinese U of Hong Kong, China
Yannis Theodoridis, U of Piraeus, Greece
Agnès Voisard, Fraunhofer ISST and FU Berlin, Germany
Ouri Wolfson, U of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Michael Worboys, U of Maine, USA
Donghui Zhang, Northeastern U, USA
Baihua Zheng, Singapore Management U, Singapore

PROLEARN Academy Newsletter 2009 - Week 8

*** News

News in 2009
Posted on: Feb 09, 2009

New issue: International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM)
Posted on: Feb 09, 2009
International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM) has just published its latest issue at --> http://www.i-jim.org. We invite you to review the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to review articles and items of interest.

There is additional information in http://www.prolearn-academy.org/News


*** New Call For Papers

Workshop on Human Computer Interaction
Call-Art: Workshop, Paper submission deadline: Mar 07, 2009
In conjunction with the 33rd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2009) Workshop on Human Computer Interaction (WoHCI 2009) provides an international meeting of researchers to explore the fundamental synergy of community media mining (media network analysis, community and media co-evolution) and HCI technologies (usability, sociability, privacy, security and trust), thus defining their future roles in social networks. Media networks - networks of media traces left by human activities on the Web - are a hot topic in the Web 2.0.

2nd Workshop on Emerging eLearning Web Technologies
Call-Art: Workshop, Paper submission deadline: Mar 01, 2009
Deadline extension

INT'L JOURNAL OF CREATIVE INTERFACES & COMPUTER GRAPHICS -- Call for Editorial Review Board Members
Call-Art: Publication, Paper submission deadline: May 01, 2009
** CALL FOR EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARD MEMBERS **, INT'L JOURNAL OF CREATIVE INTERFACES & COMPUTER GRAPHICS (IJCICG)

There is additional information in http://www.prolearn-academy.org/cfps


*** New job offers

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP @ International Center for Ethnographic Research and Training

Applicants must have excellent interpersonal skills and rigorous doctoral-level training in a field commensurate with the Fellowship opportunity (e.g., social science, anthropology, sociology, computer science, or network methods).

Editorial Review Board Members, (new) Int'l. Journal on Creative Interfaces & Computer Graphics

(Volunteer) Editorial Review Board opportunities for a new journal in a very hot area. Seeking researchers, practitioners, advanced grad students, and experts in computer graphics and HCI (and related) to serve on the review board of this exciting new project.

Open Positions in EU Project Smart Products

Technische Universität Darmstadt, Telecooperation Division (Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser) offers three positions for Research Assistants in the EU-Project Smart Products

There is additional information in http://www.prolearn-academy.org/jobs


*** PROLEARN Academy - Measure

Our auto observation tool for scientific communities contains at present 1527 projects, of which 235 are newsfeeds, 95 newsletters, 488 web sites, 68 mailinglists and 641 blogs. The number of caught entries totals 108112 for the feeds, of which 4676 were retrieved last week. For the newsletters totals 3425 entries, of which 16 were retrieved last week, for the mailinglists there are 97017 entries, of which 475 last week and for the blogs there are 206381 entries, of which 371 last week.


There is additional information about the projects in http://www.prolearn-academy.org/mediabase

We are continuously enlarging our project database.

Two Weeks in Web Science

Over the last two weeks Prof. Markus Strohmaier from the TU Graz in Austria visited RWTH Aachen Universtiy, in particular our chair of information systems and database technology. Markus left for Graz on Friday. So it is time for some reflections.

Markus got an ERASMUS scholarship for his stay in Aachen. This included some teaching load. The very idea was that I was doing the web science course at RWTH Aachen the first time and Markus already did it the year before at TU Graz. So, we decided it would be a good idea not only to share teaching materials but also help out each other with the teaching itself. Markus took over two lectures at the end of the course and to exercise classes as well. Markus lectured about the science and the engineering of "Goal Oriented Analysis of Textual Resources on the Web". He met a really motivated crowd of students. Markus told me that he was pleased by the fact that the students were so committed and stayed even after the end of the class to finish their tasks. In my opinion the reason is that Markus is a brilliant teacher and I learned a lot for my own teaching in this week.

We also tried to do some science. This happened in two ways. We had meetings where we did some real work on data sets we were researching with self written matlab code. Our data sets are coming from the Eclipse project. We think, we have found some very interesting results showing strong relationships between the complex engineering artifacts and the communication structures of engineers. Basic research. We will try to publish our results as soon as possible. We had a second type of meetings where we wildly fantasized about future research ideas, funding opportunities, and setting up new scientific infrastructures.

I communicate with Markus many times a year. We usually have email or phone conversations. Still, having a colleague sitting in the next office for a couple of weeks is much different. I have to do a lot of things during a day. Meetings with students, colleagues, paper work and other things are occupying my time. But in the moment when a colleague is entering your office you know she or he will be available only for a limited amount of time, you shift your priorities. I can only advise young researchers to visit colleagues in other institutes as much as possible. But, on both sides there should be similar interests and also similar positions in the academic hierarchy.

In both activities, members of my group were heavily involved. Yiwei, Anna, Zina, and Pham helped out a lot in preparing the lectures and the exercises of our web science course. They also collaborated a lot with Markus. Our students did some demos and Markus participated in all our regular group meetings. Many thanks to all of them.

Some last thoughts. I haven't spent so many evening on the town in the last couple of years. I am traveling a lot. International project collaboration, scientific conferences demand a lot of time from by budget. So, I eat in restaurants and spend my evenings in pubs many times. When I am home I prefer to spend the evening with my family. This time, it was a pleasure to spend the evening with Markus. Additionally, my wife was also joining us as many times as possible. From this perspective, it was like attending a conference and staying home the same time.

Agency in media networks

Call for Papers

Workshop on Human Computer Interaction (WoHCI 2009)

In conjunction with the

33rd Annual IEEE International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2009)

Seattle,Washington, July 20 - July 24, 2009

The workshop provides an international meeting of researchers to explore the fundamental synergy of community media mining (media network analysis, community and media co-evolution) and HCI technologies (usability, sociability, privacy, security and trust), thus defining their future roles in social networks. Media networks - networks of media traces left by human activities on the Web - are a hot topic in the Web 2.0.

Media networks are about connecting people through their media artifact traces. However, beyond the media artifacts are (most of the time) real people we know. We get information from those people and ultimately base our decisions on that information. The social capital in real life depends on many aspects, also from the physical environment. Is that also true for virtual worlds and online social networking environments? The intersection of both community media mining and HCI refers to new areas of research about media networks, like influencing motivations and intentions, contagion, goal moderation, personalization and responsiveness. The workshop bridges the needs of the recent media networks with best practices from HCI. Media networks have forever changed the way people interact with each other. Currently, we experience another dramatic change with new requirements for HCI. We have to adapt and apply available techniques as well as develop new means for defining relevant models of community interaction in the Web 2.0. The challenges for HCI are recognizing the impact of new media technologies on large web-based communities and their behavior. In this context, we are looking forward to the contributions on the following topics (but not exclusively):

* Community-Media Mining
* Designing for community dynamics
* Community-centered design processes for interactive systems
* Usability goals: Effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction
* Enabling technologies for community-centered learning
* Responsive frameworks for interactive systems
* Privacy-preserving technologies in media networks
* Design issues in privacy and web identity support
* Online trust in media networks
* Technology-mediated social capital
* User-centered models of design frameworks


Theme of the workshop / Context and motivation

Social networks are about connecting people. However, this purpose is not the even: it is about knowing people, getting new information from people, making decisions based on that information - all these processes are called socializing or derivables from socializing. The socializing in real life depends on environment: How cozy is a room? How are the surroundings interpreted? What are backgrounds for user behavior? and many other questions. The same reflects on virtual life. Success of technology depends on its design. The rate of interactivity of software influences on quantity and quality of human interactions. The way social networks are constructed controls the audience of these, e.g. Facebook members are mostly personalities with degrees starting from B.Sc. and Myspace members are teenagers and artistic volks. "What design for sociability is appropriate for this or that situation" is one of the important points to understand during social networks mining.

Program Committee

Jacob Biehl, FX Palo Alto Laboratory, California, USA
Kursat Cagiltay, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Luis Castro, University of Manchester, UK
Tom Erikson, IBM's Watson Labs, USA
Darren Gergle, Northwestern University, USA
Denis Gillet, EPFL, Switzerland
Victor Gonzalez, University of Manchester, UK
Wolfgang Graether, Fraunhofer FIT, Germany
Anna Hannemann, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Davinia Hernandez-Leo, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Michal Jacovi, IBM Haifa, Israel
Effie Lai-Chong Law, University of Leicester, UK
Wendy Moncur, University of Aberdeen, UK
Felix Mödritscher, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Gary Olson, University of California, Irvin, USA
Kai Pata, Tartu University, Estonia
Peter Sloep, Open University of The Nederlands, The Netherlands
Markus Strohmaier, Graz University of Technology, Austria
Nalin Sharda, School Engineering and Science, Victoria University, Australia
Lucia Terrenghi, Vodafone Group Research & Development, Germany


Important Dates

March 7, 2009 Workshop paper submission due 12 p.m. (CET)
April 10, 2009 Workshop paper notification (electronic)
April 30, 2009 All final manuscript and author pre-registration due


Submission

Both draft and camera-ready papers must be submitted electronically via the WOHCI2009 Submission Page. Manuscripts will be limited to *six *pages for regular/invited paper, four pages for short paper, two pages for fast abstract and position statement including all figures, tables, and references. Extra page charges apply. Please consult COMPSAC Paper Submission page for proper naming convention. The format of submitted papers must follow the IEEE conference proceedings guidelines (i.e., 8.5" x 11", Two-Column Format (PDF: instruct.pdf; DOC: instruct.doc); Layout Guide (PDF: format.pdf; DOC: format.doc; all under ftp://pubftp.computer.org/press/outgoing/proceedings/).

All accepted papers will be published in the electronic conference proceedings by the IEEE Computer Society, indexed through INSPEC and EI Index (Elsevier's Engineering Information Index), and automatically included in the IEEE Digital Library. At least one of the authors of each accepted paper must register as a full participant of COMPSAC for the paper to be included in the proceedings. Each accepted paper must be presented in person by an author.

Workshop Organizers

Alev Elci, Eastern Mediterranean University, Turkey
Zinayida Petrushyna, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Katja Kurdyukova, University of Augsburg, Germany
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Me, myself and Charles Darwin

Today, when I was thinking about what great scientific results or conferences I wanted to post on my little blog, I came across this fantastic website called "Devolve me". Thanks to Miss Cellina. The website is morphing your actual uploaded face image into images of your ancestors. Actually it is a nice comment to the actual Darwin year. I hope you like my transformations. By the way, the second image from the right is my actual passport image! The last one is an avatar I created with the help of another fantastic website.

DBLP Co-Authorship Graphs of all RWTH Aachen University Computer Science Professors

This is the visualization of the DBLP co-author relationships of all computer science professors at RWTH Aachen University one by one. I have grouped the graphs in a 5x6 matrix. Guess which graph belongs to which professor.

Please be aware that we use the DBLP data set. While this bibliographic data set is quite comprehensive it does not show all publications!

If you want to solve this puzzle you can use our interactive tool AERCS.

Just type the name of the professor and the co-authorship relationship graph will be displayed.
You can query every name in the DBLP data set!

This service is brought to you by the chair of information systems and database technology at RWTH Aachen University.

PROLEARN Academy Newsletter 2009 - Week 7

*** News

News in 2009
Posted on: Feb 09, 2009

New issue: International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM)
Posted on: Feb 09, 2009
International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM) has just published its latest issue at --> http://www.i-jim.org. We invite you to review the Table of Contents here and then visit our web site to review articles and items of interest.

Call for Special Tracks (ICITST-2009)
Posted on: Feb 08, 2009
The 4th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions 2009 (ICITST-2009) Technical Co-Sponsored by IEEE UK/RI Section, November 9?12, 2009, London, UK (www.icitst.org)

Call for Workshops (ICITST-2009)
Posted on: Feb 08, 2009
The 4th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions 2009 (ICITST-2009) Technical Co-Sponsored by IEEE UK/RI Section, November 9?12, 2009, London, UK (www.icitst.org)

Cfp: ICITST-2009, Technical Co-Sponsored by IEEE UK/RI Section
Posted on: Feb 03, 2009
The ICITST is an international refereed conference dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practical implementation of secured Internet transactions and to fostering discussions on information technology evolution. The ICITST aims to provide a highly professional and comparative academic research forum that promotes collaborative excellence between academia and industry

There is additional information in http://www.prolearn-academy.org/News


*** New Call For Papers

Call for Special Tracks: ICITST-2009
Call-Art: Conference, Paper submission deadline: Nov 12, 2009
The 4th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions 2009 (ICITST-2009), Technical Co-Sponsored by IEEE UK/RI Section, November 9?12, 2009, London, UK (www.icitst.org)

Call for Workshops: ICITST-2009
Call-Art: Workshop, Paper submission deadline: Apr 30, 2009
The 4th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions 2009 (ICITST-2009)Technical Co-Sponsored by IEEE UK/RI Section, November 9?12, 2009, London, UK (www.icitst.org)

There is additional information in http://www.prolearn-academy.org/cfps


*** New job offers

Open Positions in EU Project Smart Products

Technische Universität Darmstadt, Telecooperation Division (Prof. Dr. Max Mühlhäuser) offers three positions for Research Assistants in the EU-Project Smart Products

There is additional information in http://www.prolearn-academy.org/jobs


*** PROLEARN Academy - Measure

Our auto observation tool for scientific communities contains at present 1501 projects, of which 235 are newsfeeds, 95 newsletters, 462 web sites, 68 mailinglists and 641 blogs. The number of caught entries totals 106274 for the feeds, of which 4769 were retrieved last week. For the newsletters totals 3409 entries, of which 17 were retrieved last week, for the mailinglists there are 96558 entries, of which 579 last week and for the blogs there are 205973 entries, of which 794 last week.

There is additional information about the projects in http://www.prolearn-academy.org/mediabase

We are continuously enlarging our project database.

TenCompetence Winter School 2009 Video

Wow! The TenCompetence Winter School Video is really a great piece of video. Hope we can do something similar for the summer school.

Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society

This is a very interesting study concerning privacy in social networking sites by Christian Fuchs. I am getting addicted to scribd.com. For me, it is a perfect way to share d0cuments I've written myself or just read after retrieval from a public source. I am not sure about sharing those documents. Please let me know if sharing was not okay.

SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES AND THE SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Theses Academic Work privacy social networking

Christian Fuchs. Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance Society. A Critical Case
Study of the Usage of studiVZ, Facebook, and MySpace by Students in Salzburg in the
Context of Electronic Surveillance.
Published 2009, by Forschungsgruppe Unified Theory of Information (Research Group
Unified Theory of Information).
Salzburg and Vienna, Austria. ISBN 978-3-200-01428-2.
This study was conducted at the University of Salzburg, ICT&S Center
Christian Fuchs
University of Salzburg
ICT&S Center
Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18
5020 Salzburg

Creative Commons License. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Austria License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/at/deed.en

How to use Social Software in Higher Education

Barbara Kieslinger and the iCamp Team released the iCamp Handbook "How to use Social Software in Higher Education". Congratulations!

How to Use Social Software in Higher Education

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Reports Academic Work higher education social software

Workshop on semantic search - Microsearch: An Interface for Semantic Search

Workshop on semantic search - Microsearch: An Interface for Semantic Search

Peter Mika

Interactive semantization of multimedia documents using RIA technologies

Bachelor Thesis Topic:
Interactive semantization of multimedia documents using RIA technologies

The capacities of contemporary and next generation mobile devices have an enormous impact on all aspects of consumption and creation of multimedia artefacts in daily life. Video capturing, editing and broadcasting were once quite professional tasks for films, journalism, and TVs etc. The prevailing Web 2.0 platforms such as YouTube and Google Videos have lowered the barriers to disseminate videos greatly. Also video production on both high and low level is getting more and more integrated in new entertainment devices and therefore available to a greater group of also not-professional users.

This stimulates the rapid increase on number and quality of online videos. In order to consider their use for example in future mobile learning environments semantically enriched content is desired. Current video editing technologies do not meet the expectation of users to freely interact from within the video with various external information sources such as websites, blogs, and images or audio files. Considering the use of semantically enriched video it is necessary to incorporate semantic information and to deploy links to (external) multimedia content within one video item.

Standardized Metadata integration as well as user-generated metadata is one contemporary approach in order to enhance video search and retrieval among a large number of videos as well as to link to various other sources of information available online. For this purpose simple annotation tools and methods are required to enable the user to realize the desired interaction.

During this bachelor thesis, the data sets are videos related to the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Bamiyan, Afghanistan which is known for the destroyed Great Buddha in 2001. The MPEG-7 multimedia metadata standards will be employed to describe the content and the technical features of the videos and to incorporate semantic information. The usage and mapping to other cultural heritage metadata standards should be considered as well. Rich Internet Application technologies like Microsoft Silverlight or Adode Flash could be one of the selected technologies to realize this annotation service.

We look forward to working with bachelor candidates like you who are initiative, inspired by Web 2.0 and multimedia technologies, and interested in cultural heritage. For more information, please contact:

Dipl.-Inform. Yiwei Cao Lehrstuhl für Informatik 5 RWTH Aachen Tel.: +49 241/80-21516 email: cao@dbis.rwth-aachen.de

Dr. Ralf Klamma Lehrstuhl für Informatik 5 RWTH Aachen Tel. : +49 241/80-21513 email: klamma@dbis.rwth-aachen.de

Dipl. -Ing. Georgios Toubekis LFG Stadtbaugeschichte RWTH Aachen Tel. : +49 241/80-95217 email: toubekis@sbg.rwth-aachen.de

Second CFP - 8th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL 2009)

Second Call for Papers

8th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL 2009)

RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

19-21 August 2009

http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/

UPDATES:

* ICWL09 paper submission system is open. Please submit your paper as PDF
http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/submission.html

* Please follow the Springer LNCS Authors Guideline (single column of no more than 10 pages in single line spacing)
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0

* ICWL Community Visualizer is available on the Conference Website
http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/visualizer.html

ICWL is an annual international conference on web-based learning. Since the first ICWL was held in Hong Kong in 2002, it has been held in Australia (2003), China (2004), Hong Kong (2005), Malaysia (2006), United Kingdom (2007), and China (2008). The 8th ICWL 2009 will be held in Aachen, Germany, a city with rich culture, high-tech research, and a truly European spirit.
ICWL 2009 will be jointly organized by Hong Kong Web Society, RWTH Aachen University, and Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science. The technical program will feature keynote addresses, workshops, tutorials, in addition to presentations of refereed papers.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to the following:

* Technology Enhanced Learning
* Responsive Open Learning Environments
* Web-based Learning for Oriental Languages
* Mobile Learning
* Social Software and Web 2.0 for Technology Enhanced Learning
* Learning Resource Deployment, Organization and Management
* Design, Model and Framework of E-learning Systems
* E-learning Metadata and Standards
* Educational Gaming and Multimedia Storytelling for Learning
* Practice and Experience Sharing
* Pedagogical Issues

Paper Submissions:

Authors are invited to submit original papers on research results or novel applications in web-based learning. Papers for submissions should be formatted in single column of no more than 10 pages in single line spacing and in PDF format for review. All accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings. All accepted full papers presented in the conference will be published as a volume in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS. It is further planned that authors of the best papers will be invited to submit their extended versions for special issues of relevant journals.

Important Dates:

* Full Paper Submission Deadline: March 1, 2009
* Workshop Proposals Submission Deadline: March 1, 2009
* Poster Paper Submission Deadline: May 1, 2009

For more information about the conference, workshop proposal or paper
submission, please check the conference web site or send an email to: icwl2009@hkws.org

General Chair:
Matthias Jarke RWTH Aachen University, Germany

General Co-Chairs:
Ralf Klamma RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Rynson Lau City University, Hong Kong

Program Co-Chairs:
Marc Spaniol Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science, Germany
Qing Li City University, Hong Kong

Workshop Co-Chairs:
Baltasar Fernández-Manjón Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Frederick Li Durham University, United Kingdom

Organization Co-Chair:
Yiwei Cao, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Publicity Co-Chairs:
Anna Hannemann, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Christian Gütl, TU Graz, Austria
Yuanchun Shi, Tsinghua University, China

International Program Committee:
Agnes Kukulska-Hulme, The Open University, UK
Ambjörn Naeve, KTH Stockholm, Sweden
Anna Glukhova, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Andreas Schmidt, FZI Karlsruhe, Germany
Andrzej Goscinski, Deakin University, Australia
Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
C.W. Ngo, City University of Hong Kong, HK
Chengzheng Sun, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Christian Gütl, Technical University of Graz, Austria
Christopher Yang, Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK
Clement Leung, Victoria University of Technology, Australia
David Rossiter, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, HK
Denis Gillet, EPFL, Switzerland
Dickson Chiu, Dickson Computer Systems, HK
Effie Law, ETH Zürich, Switzerland
Frederick Li, Univeristy of Durham, UK
Geoff Romeo, Monash University, Australia
Gilliean Lee, Lander University, USA
Giuliana Dettori, ITD-CNR, Italy
Guoren Wang, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China
Guozhu Dong, Wright State University, USA
Hong Va Leong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HK
Howard Beck, University of Florida, USA
Howard Leung, City University of Hong Kong, HK
Hua Wang, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
John Murnane, Melbourne University, Australia
Jacques Lonchamp, LORIA & University of Nancy 2, France
Kang Zhang, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Liz Burd, Univeristy of Durham, UK
Lorna Uden, Staffordshire University, UK
Maggie Minhong Wang, The University of Hong Kong, HK
Marc Spaniol, Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, Germany
Maria Grazia Ierardi, IMATI-CNR, Italy
Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer FIT, St. Augustin, Germany
Micheal Auer, Carinthia Tech Institute Villach, Austria
Myung Hee Kang, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea
Nalin Sharda, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
Philippos Pouyioutas, Intercollege, Cyprus
Philips Wang, City University of Hong Kong, HK
Qing Li, Hong Kong Web Society, HK
Qun Jin, Waseda University, Japan
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Rynson Lau, City University of Hong Kong, HK
Samuel Choi, Hong Kong Open University, HK
Shu-Nu Chang, Aletheia University, Taiwan and Linköping University, Sweden
Simon Yip, Chinese University of Hong Kong, HK
Stefan Göbel, ZGDV , Darmstadt, Germany
Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Stephan Lukosch, TU Delft, The Netherlands
Stephane Bressan, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Sunsook Noh, Ewha Women's Univeristy, Korea
Timothy Shih, Tamkang University, Taiwan
Tomaz Klobucar, Institut Josef-Stefan, Slovenia
Wolfgang Nejdl, University of Hannover & L3S, Hannover, Germany
Xavier Ochoa Chehab, Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral, Guayaquil, Ecuador
Xiangen Hu, University of Memphis, USA
Xiaofeng Meng, Renming University, China
Yiwei Cao, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Yuanchun Shi, Tsinghua University, China
Yueh-Min Huang, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan
Zinayida Petrushyna, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Web Based Communities 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS - Deadline for submissions (extension): 27 March 2009 --

IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE WEB BASED COMMUNITIES 2009
Algarve, Portugal, 21 to 23 June 2009
(http://www.webcommunities-conf.org/)

part of the IADIS Multi Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems (MCCSIS 2009)
Algarve, Portugal, 17 to 23 June 2009
(http://www.mccsis.org)

* Keynote Speakers (confirmed):
Dr. Bob Appelman, Indiana University, USA
Laurel Papworth, Social Network Strategist, Australia

* Conference background and goals
The mission of this conference is to publish and integrate scientific results and act catalytically to the fast developing culture of web communities. The conference invites original papers, review papers, technical reports and case studies on WWW in particular the emerging role of so-called WWW-Based Communities.

* Format of the Conference
The conference will comprise of invited talks and oral presentations. The proceedings of the conference will be published in the form of a book and CD-ROM with ISBN, and will be available also in the IADIS Digital Library (accessible on-line).

* Best Papers
Selected authors of best papers will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers to selected journals (i.e. IADIS International Journal on Computer Science and Information Systems - ISSN: 1646-3692) including journals from INDERSCIENCE Publishers.

* Types of submissions
Full and Short Papers, Reflection Papers, Posters/Demonstrations, Tutorials, Panels and Doctoral Consortium. All submissions are subject to a blind refereeing process.

* Topics related to Web Based Communities are of interest. These include, but are not limited to the following areas and topics:

The history, architecture and future of virtual communities
1. From mobility to connectivity
2. Identity and augmented ideologies
3. Visionary web architectures, implanted computers
4. Network revolutions, post-colonial and post-modern societies
5. Escaping from reality, virtual reality and multi-user games
6. Towards alternative ways of presence

Group processes and self-organization
1. Tele-democracy, morality, netiquette
2. Social networks, tribal- and open communities, peace education
3. Computer mediated-, hyper- and narrative communication, woven stories
4. MUDs, MOOs and avatars
5. Hosting web-based communities
6. Nationalities, ethnicities and gender effects

Cyborgs, teleworking, telemedicine, art games and learning communities
1. Fading hierarchies and epistemic dictatorship
2. Distributed cognition, the electronic cortex and constructivism
3. Community directories
4. Mechanic world, organic computer
5. Agents and the vectorized self
6. Beyond metaphors: imagining and representation
7. Communizing as a marketing approach

Expanding markets through virtual communities
1. The WWW as digital market place
2. The enterprise as a learning community
3. The learning as a road map for business
4. Universities as online communities
5. Business-to-business communication in profit- and non profit sectors

Virtual communities for people with special needs
1. Access to public spaces
2. Accessibility and long-term disabilities
3. Virtual communities in health care

* Important Dates:
- Submission Deadline (extension): 27 March 2009
- Notification to Authors (extension): 24 April 2009
- Final Camera-Ready Submission and Early Registration (extension): Until 15 May 2009
- Late Registration (extension): After 15 May 2009
- Conference: Algarve, Portugal, 21 to 23 June 2009

* Conference Location
The conference will be held in Algarve, Portugal.

* Secretariat
IADIS Secretariat - IADIS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE WEB BASED COMMUNITIES 2009
Rua Sao Sebastiao da Pedreira, 100, 3
1050-209 Lisbon, Portugal
E-mail: secretariat@webcommunities-conf.org
Web site: http://www.webcommunities-conf.org/

* Program Committee
Web Based Communities 2009 Conference Program Chair:
Piet Kommers, University of Twente, The Netherlands

General MCCSIS Conference Co-Chairs:
Pedro Isaías, Universidade Aberta (Portuguese Open University), Portugal
Nian-Shing Chen, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan

Committee Members: *
* for committee list please refer to http://www.webcommunities-conf.org/committees.asp

International Conference on Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities (OLKC)

Announcement OLKC2009

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Other Academic Work organizational learn knowledge management

Facets of Virtual Environments

Second Call for Papers

First ICST conference on Facets of Virtual Environments

**** FaVE 2009 ****

July 27-29, 2009, Berlin

http://www.fave-conference.org

FaVE (Facets of Virtual Environments) 2009 is a refereed international academic conference devoted to persistent, multi-user virtual environments. The recent rise of World of Warcraft, Second Life and similar applications has caught the imagination of the public and scholars alike, yet until now the study of virtual environments has been subordinated to a collection of subtopics of established academic disciplines. FaVE 2009 seeks to establish virtual environments as a research field in its own right. The conference brings together under one academic umbrella current research and emerging developments in the social, technical, legal, economic, design and cultural aspects of virtual environments. To this end, FaVE 2009 invites researchers and practitioners to participate in its interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge and experience. It should be fun! FaVE 2009 welcomes contributions relating to virtual environments, from all fields. Topics include, but are not limited to:

Space & Place (theory of virtuality & space; virtual geography; geospatial web, Web3D & location-based media; mixed & augmented reality; non-euclidean geometries)

Virtual Societies (communities & networks; interaction patterns & social dynamics; reputation, prestige & peer pressure; produsage; governance & politics)

Law & Ethics (virtual government; application of real-world laws & regulations; EULA & ToS; intellectual & virtual property; virtual crime & ethics of virtual behavior)

History & Culture (history & historiography of VEs; archiving & preserving VEs; cultural heritage; VEs as art; culture and acceptance)

Technology (scalability & distributed peer-to-peer architectures; interoperability; open standards & the metaverse; security; availability, logging & recovery)

Human-Computer Interaction (interfaces & interaction devices; usability & user experience; accessibility; art direction & design; enabling user- generated content)

Productive Uses (serious games; education; collaborative virtual environments; virtual laboratories & experiments)

Economy (business models; virtual economy & currency; taxation & financial regulation; branding, in-game advertising & franchising)

Play & Games (game mechanics; storytelling; virtual agents; balancing, realm and quest design)

Uses & Effects (presence; avatars & identity; cybersickness & the uncanny valley; effects on real-life behavior)

Users & Players (user demographics; diversity & gender)

Paper Submissions

Papers presenting original, previously unpublished research or design work, not currently under review by another conference or journal are solicited.

Publication

All submitted papers will be subjected to double-blind peer review by the international technical program committee on the basis of technical quality, relevance, significance, and clarity. All accepted papers will be included in the printed and electronic FaVE 2009 Conference Proceedings to be published in the ICST Lecture Notes Series by Springer (LNICST).

Important Dates

Full Papers Due: February 13th, 2009
Notification of Acceptance: April 10th, 2009
Camera Ready Manuscripts Due: April 30th, 2009
Conference Dates: July 27th -- July 29th, 2009

Location and Venue

FaVE 2009 will take place in Berlin, Germany, at the Steigenberger Hotel (www.steigenberger.com/berlin). Hundreds of world-class museums, as well as cinemas, theatres, concert halls, shopping hotspots and fine international restaurants make Berlin an exciting place to visit during summer. We are planning an extensive social program for anyone interested in experiencing the city and its many cultural highlights.



Conference Committees
=====================

Organizing Committee:

General Conference Chair Richard A. Bartle (University of Essex)
General Conference Vice Chair Sven Grottke (University of Stuttgart)

Technical Program Chair Jan Sablatnig (Technische Universitaet Berlin)
Workshops Chair Jessica Mulligan
Panels Chair Julian Kuecklich (University of the Arts London)

Local Arrangements Chair Sabine Cikic (Technische Universitaet Berlin)

Publicity Chair Sebastian Deterding (Universiteit Utrecht)
Publication Chair Fritz Lehmann-Grube (Technische Universitaet Berlin)
Web Chair Sharon Boensch (Technische Universitaet Berlin)
Sponsorship Chair Sabina Jeschke (University of Stuttgart)

Conference Coordinator Robert Varga (ICST)


Steering Committee:

Imrich Chlamtac (Create-Net)
Sabine Cikic (Technische Universitaet Berlin)
Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger (Harvard University)

COMPLEX'09 Tentative Technical Program

COMPLEX'09 Tentative Technical Program

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Academic Work conference complexity

ICALT 2009 Workshop on Standards for Learning, Education and Training

ICOPER invites to a workshop on best practices in use of standards to support delivery of learning at ICALT 2009, Riga - Latvia, July 14 - 18, 2009

Call for papers to be presented at the workshop at ICALT 2009 on standards for Learning, Education and Training

Chairs:

• Tore Hoel, Oslo University College, Norway
• Vana Kamtsiou, National Center for Scientific Research ''DEMOKRITOS'', Greece
  
  

Workshop Description

The workshop i organised by ICOPER in co-operation with other European projects, e.g., ASPECT.

Five themes inpired by the ICOPER educational framework will help us structure the workshop.

• 1st Session: Setting-up the Learning Content Spaces/ towards a Business Model for the ICS (Why Should I Share? – what repositories, what interfaces)
• 2nd Session: High-level scenarios and use cases for competency driven higher education
• 3rd Session: Instructional models: current practices
• 4th Session: Content development for reuse: Digital Rights Management and different distribution models
• 5th Session: Use Cases & Standards for Learning delivery (from instructor lead/LMS based to PLE self directed)
  
  

The aim of the workshop will be to report on best practices identified by the ICOPER and other projects; and to give an overview of the findings concerning the suitability of specifications and standards in use in European higher education and life long learning institutions, as well as in schools. We would also like to invite interested parties to joint the best practice network which is open to experts in the field.

We would like papers and presentations on the themes outline above, and on

• modelling, coming up with the big picture of interoperability issues concerning delivery of competency-related content, e.g., based on scenarios and use cases gathered by the ICOPER project covering cross-European practices within higher education and life-long-learning.
• short presentations on relevant standards and interoperability issues concerning the five elements of the ICOPER educational framework.

The main part of the workshop will be dedicated to discussions on how to bring the bits and pieces together in a reference model that is easy to implement. Pragmatic interoperability aspects related to the dissemination of the reference model will addressed soliciting best practice advice from the global participants of ICALT 2009 .

Workshop Organization

The workshop will last for 2.5 hours. Speakers will give a 10-15 min presentations (depending in the number of accepted papers). The last 30 min of the session will be devoted to a general debate about the presented approaches and the future perspectives.
Target audience
The workshop is not exclusive to, but is meant especially for:
- Developers, educators, pedagogical experts, and students interested in learning design and / or the impact of affect on learning.
- Researchers who are exploring or plan to explore the impact of affect in learning designs, and / or learning technologies.

Program Committee

• Katherine Maillet, Groupe des Ecoles des Télécommunications, France
• Jehad Najjar, Synergetics NV, Belgium
• Petra Oberhuemer, University of Vienna, Austria
• Alexendra Okada, Open University of the UK
• Jan Pawlowski, University of Jyväskylä, Finland
• Bernd Simon, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Austria
  

Improtant dates

• February 23, 2009: Paper submission to the the Workshop Organisers Deadline
• March 3, 2009: Notification to Authors by the Workshop Organisers
• March 13, 2009: Author registration deadline, according to the ICALT Guidelines (to be announced in the ICALT2009 Web Site)
• March 25, 2009: Camera Ready and Copyright Form according to the ICALT Guidelines (to be announced in the ICALT2009 Web Site)

Submission Procedures

All submissions will be handled electronically. Please submit your contribution before the submission deadline to the workshop chairs by e-mail: tore.hoel [@] hio.no and vana [@] dat.demokritos.gr

Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the workshop programme committee.

All accepted workshop papers will be published in the online Workshop Proceedings edited by the general Workshop Chairs.

Beside this a short version of each accepted paper (2 pages long, IEEE 2-column format) will be published in the main IEEE proceedings.

Therefore, authors of accepted papers will be asked to prepare an additional short-version camera-ready paper to be included in the main IEEE proceedings.

For Authors guidelines, please look at the IEEE Computer Society guidelines. Authors can also use Word Template and Format guidelines. (See templates in ICALT page)

6th International Workshop on Text-based Information Retrieval

TIR 2009

6th International Workshop on Text-based Information Retrieval

in conjunction with DEXA 2009
Johannes Kepler University of Linz
Linz, Austria
31 August - 4 September 2009

Call for Papers

Intelligent algorithms for mining and retrieval are the key technology to cope with the information need challenges in our media-centered society. Methods for text-based information retrieval receive special attention, which results from the important role of written text, from the high availability of the Internet, and from the enormous importance of Web communities.

Advanced information retrieval and extraction uses methods from different areas: machine learning, computer linguistics and psychology, user interaction and modeling, information visualization, Web engineering, artificial intelligence, or distributed systems. The development of intelligent retrieval tools requires the understanding and combination of the achievements in these areas, and in this sense the workshop provides a common platform for presenting and discussing new solutions.

The following list organizes classic and ongoing topics from the field of text-based IR for which contributions are welcome:

• Theory. Retrieval models, language models, similarity measures, formal analysis
• Mining and Classification. Category formation, clustering, entity resolution, document classification
• Web. Community mining, social network analysis, structured retrieval from XML documents
• NLP. Text summarization, keyword extraction, topic identification
• User Interface. Paradigms and algorithms for information visualization, personalization, privacy issues
• User Context. Context models for IR, context analysis from user behaviour and from social networks
• Multilinguality. Cross-language retrieval, multilingual retrieval, machine translation for IR
• Evaluation. Corpus construction, experiment design, conception of user studies
• Semantic Web. Meta data analysis and tagging, knowledge extraction, inference, and maintenance
• Software Engineering. Frameworks and architectures for retrieval technology, distributed IR

The workshop is held for the sixth time. In the past, it was characterized by a stimulating atmosphere, and it attracted high quality contributions from all over the world. In particular, we encourage participants to present research prototypes and demonstration tools of their research ideas.

Important Dates

Deadline for paper submission	April 01, 2009, 24:00 (CET)
Notification to authors	April 20, 2009
Camera-ready copy due	May 15, 2009
Workshop opens	August 31, 2009

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

Submission Guidline

Research papers submitted to TIR-09 must be original contributions. Contributions will be peer-reviewed by at least two experts from the related field. Accepted papers will be published as IEEE proceedings by IEEE CS Press.

Submissions must generally be in electronic form using the Portable Document Format (PDF) or Postscript. It is the responsibility of authors to ensure that their papers use no unusual format features and are printable on a standard Postscript printer.

Styleguide and Author Information

The camera ready papers are limited to 5 (five) pages in IEEE format (two columns in A4). If your paper is accepted you will receive an "Author Kit" (formatting instructions etc.) from the IEEE. Papers must be written in English. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the contribution.

Submit a Contribution

Please use our conference management system ConfDriver to submit your paper.

Program Committee

Benno Stein (Co-Chair), Bauhaus University Weimar
Michael Granitzer (Co-Chair), Know-Center Graz & Graz University of Technology

Mikhail Alexandrov, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Michael Busch, IBM
Mario Döller, University of Passau
Ingo Frommholz, University of Glasgow
Shlomo Geva, Queensland University of Technology
Thomas Gottron, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Christian Gütl, Technical University Graz
Andreas Hotho, University of Kassel
Andreas Juffinger, Know-Center Graz
Roman Kern, Know-Center Graz
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen
Nedim Lipka, Bauhaus University Weimar
Matthias Lux, Klagenfurt University
Thomas Mandl, University of Hildesheim
Sven Meyer zu Eissen, Bayer Business Services GmbH
Oliver Niggemann, Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe
Nick Pendar, Iowa State University
David Pinto, Benemerita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla
Martin Potthast, Bauhaus University Weimar
Chbeir Richard, Bourgogne University
Paolo Rosso, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
Amir Saffari, University of Technology Graz
Marina Santini, University of Brighton
Serge Sharoff, University of Leeds
Ralf Schenkel, Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
Marc Spaniol, Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
Efstathios Stamatatos, University of the Aegean
Markus Strohmaier, Graz University of Technology
Andrew Trotman, Universityof Otago
Guido Zuccon, University of Glasgow