Thursday, April 30, 2009

ACM MM'09 WS on Multimedia for Cooking and Eating Activities (CEA2009)

Call for Papers

ACM Multimedia 2009 Workshop on

Multimedia for Cooking and Eating Activities (CEA2009)

October 23, 2009, Beijing, China

*** Submission Deadline *** Monday, June 15, 2009 ***

http://www.ccm.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp/CEA2009/

Cooking is one of the most fundamental activities of humankind. It is not only connected with the joy of eating but also deeply affects various aspects of human life such as health, dietary, culinary art, entertainment, and human communication. Many people who cook at home require supports for cooking because it requires experience and knowledge.
They may also need support for food-logging and menu planning for the well-being of their family. Needless to say, support for a good and enjoyable dinner would improve the quality of life. On the other hand, systematic cooking/eating support for elderly or physically challenged people is significantly important.

Thanks to modern technology, the basic environment needed for establishing such a support system at home is becoming rich. Recently, some home appliances are equipped with various sensing devices and a computer.
Reflecting this trend, researches on supporting cooking and eating activities have started individually in many corners of the world. This workshop aims to provide an opportunity for such research groups to discover each other, introduce their trials, and discuss how it should be and where they should go.

The workshop welcomes contributions in, but not limited to, the following topics:

- Application for cooking and eating support
- Cooking archiving and recognition
- Learning contents creation for cooking
- Analysis of cooking video
- Recipe image/video retrieval
- Analysis and utilization on cooking recipe
- Menu planning, dietary management, and food logging
- Artificial agent for cooking/eating activity
- Sensing of taste/ smell/ texture
- Food communication (human-to-human/ human-to-computer communication)
- Ubiquitous environment and interface in kitchen
- Intelligent home appliance
- Cooking navigation and supporting interface for the dementia and physically challenged persons
- Multimedia learning contents for dietary
- Multimedia information service for food safety and security

Paper Submission Guidelines

Submissions to the workshop should follow the main conference guidelines. It should be prepared in double-column ACM proceedings style not longer than eight pages, and submitted in the form of PDF files through http://edas.info/N7739 by the deadline. Once accepted, at least one author should register to and present at the workshop to publish the paper.

Important Dates
Monday, June 15, 2009 Submission Deadline
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 Author Notification
Friday, July 24, 2009 Camera Ready Deadline
Friday, October 23, 2009 Workshop in Beijing

Organizing Committee
Michihiko MINOH, Kyoto University, Japan
Mutsuo SANO, Osaka Institute of Technology, Japan
Ichiro IDE, Nagoya University / NII, Japan
Yoko YAMAKATA, NICT, Japan
Takuya FUNATOMI, Kyoto University, Japan
Kenzaburo MIYAWAKI, Osaka Institute of Technology, Japan

Program Committee (tentative)
Yuichi Nakamura, Kyoto University, Japan
Yasushi Nakauchi, University of Tsukuba, Japan
Motoyuki Ozeki, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Japan
Hidenori Tsuji, Institute of Information Technology, Japan
Toshihiko Yamasaki, The University of Tokyo, Japan
Shunichi Yonemura, NTT, Japan

Contact
To reach the organizers: cea2009@ccm.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp
CEA2009 Website:
http://www.ccm.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp/CEA2009/
ACM Multimedia 2009 Website: http://www.acmmm09.org/

Deadline Extension for Workshop on Interoperability through Semantic Data and Service Integration

CALL FOR PAPERS

1st International Workshop on
Interoperability through Semantic Data and Service Integration

Camogli (Genova), Italy
June 25, 2009

Co-located with SEBD 2009

Workshop web site
http://sebd09.disi.unige.it/satellite-events.html

The problem of how to provide transparent access to heterogeneous information sources, while maintaining their autonomy, already appeared decades ago and has been addressed by data integration techniques. Those techniques enable the interaction between clients and data sources
through a centralized access point and uniform query interfaces that give users the illusion of querying a homogeneous system. Recently, the research community has been focusing on investigating about the integration of multimedia data sources. Several approaches for representing and managing multimedia data, mainly based on either specific representation models or on the development of common ontologies, have been proposed. Besides data, services are another kind of resources that need to be shared and used to ensure application level interoperability in open information systems. Web services and service-oriented architectures are rather new technologies with the common goal of making software components and business applications available via standardized interfaces. Service discovery differs from data query, since a discovery engine is based on a different description of web-services made of inputs, outputs, preconditions, effects, ...

The research on data integration and service discovering involved in the last years different, not overlapping communities. As a consequence, data and services are described with different models, and different techniques to retrieve data and services have been developed. But from a
user perspective, the border between data and services is often not so definitive: data and services provide a complementary vision about the domain they refer to.

The impact of this topic is very high. Let us consider for example web information systems, where the information about the same topic is provided with different kinds of knowledge: unstructured textual contents, deep web data sources, web services, images and other multimedia files. In this scenario, a new goal has to be pursued: providing users with a uniform way to represent and search for data and services with a unique technology. Multiple and challenging research issues have to be addressed for achieving it: the mediation among different models for representing information, the development of techniques for extracting and mapping relevant information from such heterogeneous kinds of data, the development of new paradigm for formulating and processing queries and the investigation of new models for visualizing the results.
Another important challenge of this scenario where very different information sources are involved (from data sources to services, from traditional data to multimedia data) is the quick development of systems starting from the collection of the different tools that manage these
different kind of information sources. Finally, the process of integration need to be dynamic, in order to deal with the modification of the sources, and automatic, to reduce the time required to generate a unified view and to obtain shared knowledge from the current web comprising millions of autonomous sources.

Research papers and software demonstrations of interest for this Workshop will show and highlight the different models, tools and practical experience in which techniques for integrating structured, multimedia data, and services have been developed and applied to support
any relevant business process, and assess their degree of success, the difficulties which were addressed, the solutions which have been found, the new tools which have been implemented. Moreover, extended abstract containing descriptions of on-going projects or presenting results
already published are also welcome.


Topics:

- Unified modelling of Data and Services
- Mapping and Integration of Data, Multimedia Documents and Services
- Retrieving of Data and Services
- Service integration in multimedia
- Light and flexible approaches to integration
- Peer-to-peer data integration
- Light and flexible approaches to integration
- Ontology-based integration of data and services
- On-the-fly integration
- Data quality and Duplicate detection in data integration
- Real cases and application scenarios of integration of data and services in business environment

Important Dates

10 May 2009: Deadline for paper submission
30 May 2009: Notification of acceptance
10 June 2009: Camera ready deadline
21-24 June 2009: SEBD conference
25 June 2009: workshop

Paper Submission

Research papers presenting original works should be at most 12 pages long whereas extended abstract should be at most 8 pages long. Papers can be written in English or Italian. In order to allow a meaningful assignment of your paper to the most suitable reviewers, it is important that you indicate the content of the paper with a suitable set of keywords from the provided list. Submissions must be in electronic form in Portable Document Format (PDF) format.

Papers must be formatted using the Lecture Notes in Computer Science style available at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.


Papers should be submitted as a pdf file through the conference management system, at the following url:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=isdsi09

Co-Chairs
Tiziana Catarci
Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica "A. Ruberti"
Sapienza Ð UniversitaÕ di Roma
Via Ariosto 25, 00185 Roma
ITALY
Phone: +39-0677274007
Fax: +39-0677274007
email: catarci@dis.uniroma1.it

Sonia Bergamaschi
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Via Vignolese 905, 41125 Modena
ITALY
Phone: +39-0592056132
Fax: +39-0592056129
email: sonia.bergamaschi@unimore.it

Carlo Batini
Dipartimento di Informatica Sistemistica e Comunicazione
Universita' di Milano-Bicocca
Viale Sarca, 336 - 20126 Milano
ITALY
Phone: +39-0264487826
Fax: +39-0264487805
email: batini@disco.unimib.it <mailto:batini@disco.unimib.it>

Domenico Beneventano
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Via Vignolese 905, 41125 Modena
ITALY
Phone: +39-0592056141
Fax: +390592056129
email: domenico.beneventano@unimore.it

Organizing Committee

Carola Aiello
Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica A.Ruberti
Sapienza Ð UniversitaÕ di Roma
via Ariosto, 25 - 00185 Roma
tel. +39 06 77274 013 - int. 35013
fax. +39 06 77274002
email: caiello@dis.uniroma1.it

Serena Sorrentino
Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia
Via Vignolese 905, 41125 Modena
ITALY
Phone: +39-0592056242
Fax: +390592056129
email: serena.sorrentino@unimore.it

Program Commitee
Alfredo Cuzzocrea, University of Calabria, Italy
Andrea Maurino, University of Milano Bicocca, Italy
Axel Hahn, University of Oldenburg, Germany
Claudio Sartori, University of Bologna, Italy
Dario Cerizza, CEFRIEL, Milano, Italy
Fausto Rabitti, ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy
Francesco Guerra, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
Gianluca Moro, University of Bologna, Italy
Isabel Cruz, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Maurizio Vincini, University of Modena and Reggio-Emilia, Italy
Michele Missikof, LEKS-IASI CNR, Roma, Italy
Piero De Sabbata, ENEA, SIC-UDA-PMI Bologna, Italy
Omar Boucelma, UniversitŽ Aix-Marseille, France

Update and Swine Flu Breaking News: Social Network Analysis Conferences in 2009

2009 seems to be a great year for social network analysis and computer science. Here is a list of conferences I am aware of. Please comment to add other conferences. What is your favorite SNA conference?

Breaking News!
Due to the outbreak of swine flu virus, we regret to announce that the dg.o 2009 conference will not be held in Puebla on May 17-20 this year.

Update: WWW 2009, NetSciCom 2009, ACM GROUP, GameNets programmes, SNMABA2009, SSM 2009, ASNA 2009
  • SNA2009 - International Conference on Social Network Analysis and Applications,
    January 28-29 , 2009, New Delhi, India
    The schedule/proceedings of this event are available online. However, there is room for improvement.
  • COMPLEX 2009 - The First International Conference on Complex Systems:
    Theory and Applications, February 23-25, 2009, Shanghai, China
    The programme is available here.
  • Sunbelt XXIX - The Annual Meeting of the International Network for Social Network Analysis, March 10-15, 2009, San Diego, USA (Sunbelt XXX will be in Trento, Italy!)
  • M3SN - Workshop on Modeling, Managing, and Mining of Evolving Social Networks in conjunction with the 25th International Conference on Data Engineering ICDE'09, March 29, 2009, Shanghai, China
    The programme is available here.
  • AISB 2009 - Convention on Adaptive and Emergent Behaviour and Complex Systems, April 6-9, 2009, Edinburgh, UK
    The programme is available here.
  • WWW 2009 - Social Networks and Web 2.0 track, April 20-24, 2009, Madrid, Spain
    The programme is available here.
  • NetSciCom 2009 - First IEEE International Workshop on Network Science
    For Communication Networks in conjunction with IEEE Infocom 2009 , April 24, 2009 - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
    The programme is available here.
  • German Conference "Visualisierung von Netzwerken", May 1-2, 2009, Munich, Germany
    The programme is available here.
  • ACM GROUP 2009, May 10 - 13, 2009, Sanibel Island, USA
    The programme is available here.
  • GameNets 2009 - International Conference on Game Theory for Networks, 13-15 May 2009, Istanbul, Turkey
    The programme is available here.
  • dg.o 2009 - 10th International Digital Government Research Conference "Social Networks: Making Connections between Citizens, Data & Government", May 17-20, 2009, Puebla, Mexico
    Breaking News! Due to the outbreak of swine flu virus, we regret to announce that the dg.o 2009 conference will not be held in Puebla on May 17-20 this year.
  • ICWSM 2009 - 3rd Int'l AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, May 17 - 20, 2009, San Jose, California
    Accepted papers are here.
  • CASoN 2009 - International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks, June 24 - 27, 2009, Fontainebleau, France
  • Hypertext 2009 - The Twentieth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, June 29 - July 1, 2009, Torino, Italy
  • KDD-2009 - The Fifteenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'09), June 28 - July 1, 2009, Paris, France
  • SNAKDD 2009 - The 3rd International Workshop on Social Network Mining and Analysis (SNAKDD 2009), June 28, 2009, Paris France
  • ISSI 2009 - 12th International Conference on Scientometrics and Informetrics
    July 14-17, 2009, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
    ASONAM 2009 - The 2009 International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Data Mining, July 20-22, 2009 Athens, Greece
  • MSNDS 2009 - The First International Workshop on Mining Social Networks for Decision Support (MSN-DS 2009) (in conjunction with ASONAM 2009), July 20-22, 2009, Athens, Greece
  • SSM 2009 - Workshop on Search in Social Media (), 23 July 2009, Boston, MA, USA, Co-located with SIGIR 2009
  • The 2009 International Conference on Data Mining - Session on Data Mining in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, July 13-16, 2009, Las Vegas, USA
  • AMCIS 2009 -Minitrack "Social Network Analysis in IS Research" at 15th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2009) August 6-9, 2009, San Fransisco, USA
  • KDWeb2 2009 -The 1st International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery in Web 2.0 Environments, August 25-27, 2009, Seoul, Korea
  • ASNA 2009 - 6th Conference on Applications of Social Network Analysis, August 27-28, 2009, Zurich, Switzerland
  • SocialCom-09 - The 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, Ausgust 29-31, 2009, Vancouver, Canada
  • SNMABA2009 - The International Workshop on Social Networks Mining and Analysis for Business Applications, 29-31 August, 2009, Vancouver, Canada
  • DAMIEN -Workshop DAta MIning for the EvolviNg Web in conjunction with the 13th East European Conference on Advances in Databases and Information Systems (ADBIS2009), September 7th 2009, Riga, Latvia
  • DSN'09 - 2nd Workshop Digital Social Networks - One Day Workshop at the annual meeting of the German Society for Computer Science (GI), September 28th – October 2nd, 2009, Lübeck, Germany
  • WIKISYM 2009 - The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, October 25-27 in Orlando, Florida, USA

PhD opportunity in INRIA, France

"Performance and optimizations in peer-to-peer data management"

Detailed description: http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~manolesc/PhD2009.pdf

Lab: INRIA Saclay--Ile-de-France and LRI, Universite de Paris Sud
Team: Gemo-IASI (http://gemo.saclay.inria.fr)
Advisor: Ioana Manolescu (ioana.manolescu@inria.fr,
http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~manolesc)

Starting: september 2009 (can be delayed at most until january 2010)
Duration: 3 years
Profile:
- good academic record
- in-depth courses in databases, including some among the following topics: query optimization, query evaluation, distributed databases, peer-to-peer systems
- good programming skills
- knowledge on Semantic Web foundations and technologies a plus

To apply: contact *** ASAP *** ioana.manolescu@inria.fr

For the formal application process, you will need to provide:
- CV and academic record
- recommendation letter(s)

Two funding opportunities are envisioned; the first deadline is May 4, 2009.

SIGIR 2009 Workshop: Understanding the user - Logging and interpreting user interactions in IR

Call for Papers / Participation

SIGIR 2009 Workshop: Understanding the user - Logging and interpreting user
interactions in information search and retrieval

http://uiir-2009.dfki.de/

Workshop held in conjunction with SIGIR'09 (http://sigir2009.org) in Boston,
USA July 23, 2009


*** IMPORTANT DATES ***

May 18, 2009: Submission deadline for
- papers
- position statements (not mandatory, but encouraged)

June 8, 2009: Notification of acceptance
June 15, 2009: Submission deadline for
- camera-ready paper
- one introductory slide for each participant

July 23, 2009: Workshop date

*** OVERVIEW ***

Modern information search systems can benefit greatly from using additional information about the user and the user's behavior. Feedback data based on direct interaction (e.g., clicks, scrolling, etc.) as well as on general user profiles/preferences has been proven valuable for personalizing the retrieval process. New technology has made it inexpensive and easy to collect more feedback data and more different types of data (e.g., gaze, emotional, or biometric data). The workshop focuses on discussing and identifying most promising research directions with respect to logging,
interpreting, integrating, and using feedback data. Ultimately, it will be aimed at arranging a commonly shared collection of user interaction logging tools for various purposes and based on a variety of feedback data sources. The workshop brings together researchers from IR as well as from human-computer interaction.

*** PARTICIPATION ***

Participants are encouraged to contribute in one of the following ways (submission deadline: May 18, 2009; camera-ready deadline: June 15):

- Experience papers, describing acquisition, logging, interpretation and/or use of user interaction data (maximum 4 pages). Could be accepted as presentation or poster.
- Demo of application or new technology descriptions (not exceeding 2 pages). Presented as demo.
- Position statement (1 to 2 pages) about focused types of user
- interaction data / their interpretation / their use.

PDF files should be prepared in ACM format (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). Papers should be submitted online via EasyChair
(http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=uiir2009).

Additionally, all participants are encouraged to submit one slide about their main interest (submission deadline: June 15, 2009). The slide will be presented during a participant introduction session in the beginning of the workshop.

*** TOPICS OF INTEREST ***

include but are not limited to:

* Types of implicit data
o Gaze
o Affect
o Use
o Physiological data
o Click-through
* Tools for acquiring/logging implicit data
o Observation technologies
+ Search tool instrumentation (clicks, mouse movements,
printing, ...)
+ Eye tracking
+ Bio sensors
+ EEG
+ Facial expression detection
o Frameworks for logging user interaction data
* Interpretation of implicit data
o Integration of different types of implicit data
o Models (long-term/short-term) of
+ User interest
+ User types
+ User tasks
+ User states
+ Other contextual features
* Use/application of implicit data
o Personalization of
+ Retrieval results
+ Interaction mode
+ Visualization and presentation
o Deciding when to use implicit data

*** ORGANIZERS ***

Nicholas J. Belkin, Rutgers University, USA
Ralf Bierig, Rutgers University, USA
Georg Buscher, DFKI GmbH, Kaiserslautern, Germany
Ludger van Elst, DFKI GmbH, Kaiserslautern, Germany
Jacek Gwizdka, Rutgers University, USA Joemon
Jose, Glasgow University, Scotland
Jaime Teevan, Microsoft Research, USA


Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Optimal Solutions for Spatially Continuous Labelling Problems

Time: Thursday, April 30, 2009, 4.30 PM
Place: RWTH Aachen University, AH I, Ahornstr. 55

Prof. Dr. Daniel Cremers
University of Bonn

Optimal Solutions for Spatially Continuous Labelling Problems

Abstract:

Numerous computer vision problems can be cast as labelling problems where each point is assigned one of several labels. The case of two labels includes problems like binary segmentation and multi-view reconstruction. The case of multiple labels includes problems such as stereo depth reconstruction and image denoising. In my presentation, I will introduce methods of convex relaxation and functional lifting which allow to optimally solve such labelling problems in a spatially continuous setting. Experimental results demonstrate that these spatially continuous approaches provide numerous advantages over spatially discrete (graph cut) formulations, in particular they are easily parallelized (lower runtime), they require less memory (higher resolution) and they do not suffer from metrication errors (better accuracy).

This is joint work with Kalin Kolev, Maria Klodt, Thomas Brox, Selim Esedoglu and Thomas Pock.

Deadline Extended:The International Workshop on Social Networks Mining and Analysis for Business Applications

The International Workshop on Social Networks Mining and Analysis for
Business Applications
(SNMABA2009)
29-31/August/2009 Vancouver, Canada
http://im.nuk.edu.tw/~iting/SNMABA2009/

Important Dates:
3 May, 2009 Paper Submission Deadline
1 June, 2009 Notification of Acceptance
15 June, 2009 Camera-Ready Due
29-31 August, 2009 Conference Dates

Social networks mining and analysis has now becoming a very popular research area not only for data mining and web mining but also social computing and social network analysis. Data mining is a technique that has the ability to process and analyze large amount of data and by this to discover valuable information from the data. In recent year, due to the growth of social communications and social networking websites, data mining becomes a very important and powerful technique to process and analyze such large amount of data.
Recently, many researches are focusing on developing new data mining techniques and algorithms, or devoting to improve traditional mining techniques for social network analysis. However, it is meaningless, if the discovered valuable and useful data have not been applied in real environment. In most of application areas, business applications are expected to be killer applications for social network analysis and social computing. Thus, it could be an important time to shift the research focus to application area, such as business.
This year, the workshop will be held in conjunction with The 2009 IEEE International Conference on Social Computing(SocialCom-09) in Vancouver, Canada. We are looking forward to you submission and participation to the workshop and the main conference. This workshop invites papers of the following topics, but never exclusive:

Social Networks Mining and Analysis for Management
Social Networks Mining and Analysis for Marketing and Advertisement
Social Networks Mining and Analysis for Human Resource Management
Social Networks Mining and Analysis for E-commerce
Social Networks Mining and Analysis for E-services
Social Networks Mining and Analysis for privacy issues in business
Social Networks Mining and Analysis for fraud detection in business
Social Networks Mining and Analysis for Technology Innovation and Patents
Visualization Techniques
Experiment and Implementation
Case Studies and Empirical Studies

Workshop Chairs: I-Hsien Ting, Ting-Lin Lee, Tien-Hwa Ho

Paper Submissions:
Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers that are not being considered in another forum. Manuscripts will be limited to 8 (IEEE style) pages. Please follow the IEEE Computer Society Press Proceedings Author Guidelines to prepare your papers with 8.5'' x 11'' two-column format. Submission should include the title, author(s), affiliation(s), e-mail address(es), tel/fax numbers, abstract, and postal address(es) on the first page.

Please submit your manuscript to: Dr. I-Hsien Ting iting@nuk.edu.tw

I-SPAN 2009 and SOCA 2009: Call for Papers

1. The 10th International Symposium on Pervasive Systems, Algorithms and Networks (I-SPAN 2009)
December 14-16, 2009, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
http://ispan2009.comm.ccu.edu.tw

I-SPAN 2009 Proceedings will be published by IEEE CS Press (EI Indexed)

Selected I-SPAN 2009 papers will be invited for publication
in the special issues of some international journals.
Potential journals include:

-Journal of Information and Science Engineering (JISE)
-International Journal of Ad-Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing (IJAHUC)
-Journal of Internet Technology (JIT)
-Telecommunication Systems (TS)
-Computer Communications (CompComm)
-Journal of Interconnection Networks (JOIN)

Important Dates

Workshop Proposal Due: April 30, 2009
Full Paper Due: June 15, 2009
Authors Notification: Aug. 15, 2009
Final Manuscript Due: Sept. 1st, 2009

Workshop Proposal:
The I-SPAN 2009 Organizing Committee invites proposals for one-day / half-day
workshops affiliated with the conference and addressing research area related
to the Symposium. The workshop proceedings will be also published by IEEE and
Indexed by EI. If you would like to organize a workshop, please check the
information at http://ispan2009.comm.ccu.edu.tw/workshop/

2. IEEE International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing and Applications (SOCA'09)
December 14-15, 2009, Taipei, Taiwan
http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/soca09

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Service-oriented architecturel
Service-oriented software engineeringl
Service system technologyl
Service-oriented semantic computingl
SOC for cyber-physical systemsl
Embedded and real-time servicesl
Grid and cloud servicesl
Service-oriented applicationsl

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission: August 1, 2009
Author notification: September 15, 2009
Final manuscript: October 15, 2009

PAPER SUBMISSION

Papers presenting original and unpublished work are invited and will be
evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and
clarity of exposition. Submitted papers should be formatted in a two-column
IEEE Computer Society format (URL: http://computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm)
and should not exceed eight pages including figures and references.
Submissions will be via the conference web site:

http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/soca09.

For further information of the conference, please contact Prof. Chung-Ta King
at king@cs.nthu.edu.tw.

Beyond REST? Building data services with XMPP

(((Great presentation - XMPP equals quantum mechanics :-)))

WIDM 2009: Call for Papers

11th ACM International Workshop on Web Information and Data Management (WIDM 2009)

November 2, 2009, Hong Kong, China
http://widm2009.ist.psu.edu/

Sponsored by ACM SIGIR and SIGWEB
In Conjunction with the 18th ACM CIKM 2009

***** Paper due: July 10th, 2009 *****


ACM WIDM 2009 is the eleventh in a series of workshops on Web Information and Data Management to be held in conjunction with the 18th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009). The objective of the workshop is to bring together
researchers, industrial practitioners, and developers to study how Web information can be extracted, stored, analyzed, and processed to provide useful knowledge to the end users for various advanced database and Web applications.


TOPICS OF INTEREST
-------------------

-- Web Mining: Web Usage Mining, Web Classification, Web Clustering, Resource Discovery, Web Personalization, Web Data Extraction, Web Structure Mining

-- Formal Models for Web Data and Knowledge Management: Data Models and Meta-data, Semi-structured Data and XML, Query Languages, Annotations, Ontologies

-- System Issues for Web Applications: Performance of Web Applications, System Design, Caching and Indexing of Web data, P2P

-- Methodologies for Web Data Management: Data Integration, Archiving, Security, Personalization

-- Tools and Infrastructure for Web Data Management: Web Site Modeling and Design, Web Visualization Tools, Intelligent Agents on the Web, Web Services

-- Web Applications: Digital Libraries, Web Portals, Warehousing, Web Information Filtering, Web Commerce, Web Monitoring

-- Web Exploration: Web Crawling, Web Search Engines


IMPORTANT DATES
---------------

Paper submission: July 10th, 2009
Notification of acceptance: August 10th, 2009
Camera-ready copy due date: August 15th, 2009


PAPER SUBMISSION
----------------

Electronic submission will be used. The pdf version of the paper should be submitted to the WIDM 2009 electronic review system no later than July 10th, 2009. The paper should be formatted in the camera ready ACM format and should be at most 8 pages long. The paper should present innovative ideas on the topics of interest and not be published or under consideration elsewhere. More detailed information about the paper submission procedure will be available at the workshop website. All accepted papers will appear in the Proceedings published by ACM Press.


PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIRS

Chee-Yong Chan
Department of Computer Science, National University of Singapore, Singapore

Prasenjit Mitra
The Pennsylvania State University, USA

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Angela Bonifati ICAR-CNAR Italy
Yi Chen Arizona State University USA
Zhiyuan Chen University of Maryland Baltimore County USA
Byron Choi Hong Kong Baptist University Hong Kong
Bin Cui Peking University China
Hang Cui Yahoo! Research USA
Zhicheng Dou Microsoft Research China
Vuk Ercegovac IBM Almaden Research Lab USA
George Fletcher Washington State University USA
Irini Fundulaki ICS Forth Greece
Floris Geerts University of Edinburgh UK
Bernard Jim Jansen The Pennsylvania State University USA
Panagiotis Kalnis King Abdullah Univ. of Science & Tech. Saudi Arabia
Daniel Kifer The Pennsylvania State University USA
Georgia Koutrika Stanford University USA
Sang-goo Lee Seoul National University South Korea
Chengkai Li University of Texas at Arlington USA
Feifei Li Florida State University USA
Tao Li Florida International University USA
Ee-Peng Lim Singapore Management University Singapore
Bo Luo University of Kansas USA
Gang Luo IBM TJ Watson Research Lab USA
Michael Nelson Old Dominion University USA
Yuan Ni IBM China Research Lab China
Neolkis Polyzotis University of California-Santa Cruz USA
Oded Shmueli Technion - Israel Institute of Tech. Israel
Pierre Senellart Telecom ParisTech France
Raymond Wong Hong Kong Univ. of Science & Tech. Hong Kong
GuiRong Xue Shanghai Jiao Tong University China

Call for Applications: Summer School on Semantic Computing, Berkeley 2009

International Summer School on Semantic Computing

July 20-25, 2009

at the

University of California, Berkeley

co-sponsored by IEEE, Institute of Semantic Computing
and STI International

Semantic Computing is currently emerging as a new field that integrates methods from multimedia (computer vision, speech processing), natural language processing, semantic web and ontology engineering, software engineering, and other fields with the goal of creating new applications that connect intuitively formulated user-intentions with the content of data.

The summer school will provide an introduction to the field to senior undergraduate and graduate students. A mix of young and well-established researchers and educators will present recent research results, as for example presented in the IEEE conferences on Semantic Computing. The tutorials will be complemented by keynote talks by renowned experts in the areas of Semantic Technologies, Ontologies, Multimedia or Natural Language Processing.

The 6-day event is taking place on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley and the curriculum will include the following topics:

- Formal Semantics
- Semantic Web
- Ontology Engineering
- Multimedia
- Natural Language Processing

Important Dates:
* February, 15: Application opens
* NEW: May, 8: Application closes
* NEW: May, 15: Notification of acceptance/Registration opens
* NEW: June, 15: Registration completed
* July, 20: School starts

For instruction on how to apply and other information, please visit the following website: http://sssc2009.org/

EMERGING 2009 | Emerging Network Intelligence | October 11-16, 2009 - Sliema, Malta

CALL FOR PAPERS, TUTORIALS, PANELS

EMERGING 2009: The First International Conference on Emerging Network
Intelligence

October 11-16, 2009 - Sliema, Malta


General page: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2009/EMERGING09.html

Call for Papers: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2009/CfPEMERGING09.html

Submission deadline: May 20, 2009


Technically Co-sponsored by the IEEE Malta Section

Sponsored by IARIA, www.iaria.org

Submissions will be peer-reviewed, published by IEEE CPS, posted in IEEE
Digital Library, and indexed with the major indexes

Extended versions of selected papers will be published in IARIA Journals:
http://www.iariajournals.org

Please note the Poster Forum and Work in Progress track


The topics suggested by the conference can be discussed in term of concepts,
state of the art, research, standards, implementations, running experiments,
applications, and industrial case studies. Authors are invited to submit
complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other
conference or journal in the following, but not limited to, topic areas.

All tracks are open to both research and industry contributions, in terms of
Regular papers, Posters, Work in progress, Technical/marketing/business
presentations, Demos, Tutorials, and Panels.


Before submission, please check and conform with the Editorial rules:
http://www.iaria.org/editorialrules.html


EMERGING 2009 Tracks (tracks' topics and submission details: see CfP on the
site)

- Advanced communications

Next-generation architectures; Advanced communications systems; New
configurable protocols stacks and real-time mechanisms; Applications and
services for next-generation architectures; Scalability and manageability of
network architectures; Opportunistic and cooperative communications

- Emerging networking

Network coding; Visualization of network behavior; Semantic routing; Network
flow processing; Cross-layer design and optimization; High-speed networking;
Context-aware mobile networking

- Advanced network elements

Network processors; Content addressable memories; Multi-core processors;
Context-aware reconfigurable devices; Portable and wearable devices; Mobile
multimedia devices

- Optimization

Power optimization in data centers; Delay and fault tolerant networks; Video
conferencing and telepresence systems; Resource optimization; Context-aware
optimization

- Quality

Quality of service; Quality of performance; Quality of experience; Quality
of data; Quality of modeling; Quality-oriented routing; Quality of context
/degradation, trust, uncertainty, consistency/

- Smartness

Cognitive radio; Autonomic and dependable communications; Ambient systems;
Identity and location in mobile environments; Smart homes; Brain-like
networking and computing

- Discovery

Resource discovery; Service discovery; Content discovery; Flaws/anomaly
discovery

- Protection

Anticipative control and management; Data protection strategies;
Collaborative Internet attack containment; Micro-kernels and robustness

- Security

Trust and credential negotiations; Privacy; Intrusion prevention and
containment; Security in virtualization approach; Architectural support for
security; Security, privacy, and dependability; Security in cooperative
networks

- Programmability

Programmable and real-time network traffic measurements; Adaptive
scheduling; Network and application load balancing; High-performance
capabilities-based networks; Software techniques to improve virtualized I/O
performance

- End-user

Frequently changing user profile; User mobility and ubiquity; Scalable and
resource intensive multi-user distributed applications; User identity and
multi-service access technologies; End-user perception; End-user based
networking and service orchestration; End-user activity recognition with
multiple goals

- Mobility

Mobile Internet services; Mobility-oriented protocols /Mobile IP, etc./;
Wearable and/or mobile technologies; Self-discovery and localizing entities;
Seamless handover

- Ubiquity

Ubiquitous computing; Pervasive and embedded systems; Ubiquitous
sustainability; Sensing location; Activity patterns; Smart environments in
the workplaces; Ubiquitous cities

- Semantics and Adaptiveness

Content-aware networks; Network-aware applications; Semantic Web; Adaptive
systems; Adaptive applications; Self-adaptiveness; Ontology-based
adaptation; Semantic profile; Semantic service orchestration;
Multi-technology semantic integration /sensors, ehealth, geosensing, etc./

- Wireless

Wireless access technologies / WLANs, WiMAX, satellite, 3G, etc./;
Multi-hope wireless networks /sensor, ad hoc, mesh, etc./; Wireless QoS and
reliability; Wireless body area networks; Energy optimization

- Emerging technologies and applications

Vehicular ad hoc networks; Bio-inspired networks; Tele-medicine/e-health
networks; User-centric services and applications; Autonomous and autonomic
systems; Self-manageable systems; Emerging computation business models;
Social networks; eSociety

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

EMERGING Advisory Chairs

Carl James Debono, University of Malta & IEEE Malta, Malta

Petre Dini, Cisco Systems, Inc., USA / Concordia University, Canada

Dominic Greenwood, Whitestein Technologies, Switzerland


EMERGING 2009 Industry-Research Chairs

Tadashi Araragi, NTT Communication Science Laboratories, Japan

Mohamed Eltoweissy, Virginia Tech, USA

Corrado Moiso, Telecom Italia, Italy


EMERGING 2009 Technical Program Committee Chairs

Maurice Mulvenna, University of Ulster, UK

Gianluca Reali, Università degli Studi di Perugia, Italy

Naoki Wakamiya, Osaka University, Japan


Committee members: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2009/ComEMERGING09.html

CISP'09-BMEI'09 Final Call: Extended Deadline 20 May

The 2nd International Congress on Image and Signal Processing (CISP 2009) and the 2nd International Conference on BioMedical Engineering and Informatics (BMEI 2009) will be jointly held in Tianjin, China, from 17 to 19 October 2009. We cordially invite you to submit a paper and/or an exhibition. Due to numerous requests, the submission deadline is extended to 20 May 2009.

Selected best papers will appear in SCI-indexed journals, such as "Multimedia Tools and Applications" and "Journal of Medical Systems". The papers published in the proceedings will be included in the IEEE Xplore and indexed in Ei Compendex (CISP 2009 IEEE Catalog Number:
CFP0994D; BMEI 2009 IEEE Catalog Number: CFP0993D). CISP'09-BMEI'09 is technically co-sponsored by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society.

Tianjin is one of the four municipalities in China. It is a financial and commercial center in North China and is known for its numerous travel resources and rich history, such as the Huangyaguan Great Wall, Dule Temple, Panshan Mountain and Food Street. It takes only 30 minutes
to travel between Tianjin and Beijing by high-speed train. The registration fee of US$420 includes lunches, dinners, and banquet. The previous CISP'09-BMEI'09 attracted over 2600 submissions from more than 30 countries.

CISP'09-BMEI'09 aims to provide a high-level international forum for scientists and researchers to present the state of the art of multimedia, signal processing, biomedical engineering, and biomedical informatics.

For more information, visit the conference web page:

http://www.tjut.edu.cn/cisp-bmei2009

If you have any questions after visiting the conference web page,
please email the secretariat at cisp2009@tjut.edu.cn

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Semantic processing of multimedia data by MPEG-7

Metadata and Personalized On-Line Learning

Another trip into the past. This was an invited talk at the WWW 2003 emergent track about technology enhanced learning.

Deadline extension: 2nd Workshop Digital Social Networks

2nd Workshop Digital Social Networks

Table of Contents IT and People 22:1 Special issue: Using social theory to make sense of IS

(((In information systems understanding theories from other disciplines like sociology is mission critical.)))

ITP Special Issue : Using social theory to make sense of IS

Special issue editors: Gamila Shoib and Joe Nandhakumar

Guest editorial: Using social theory to make sense of IS: what's it all about?
by Gamila Shoib and Joe Nandhakumar

In and out of actor-network theory: a necessary but insufficient journey
by Nathalie Mitev (pp. 9-25)

Taking a feminist approach to information systems research and using the "thinking tools" provided by the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
by Helen Richardson (pp. 26-35)

The element of surprise: appreciating the unexpected in (and through) actor networks
by Neil C. Ramiller and Erica L. Wagner (pp. 36-50)

A social actor understanding of the institutional structures at play in information systems development
by Bruce Rowlands (pp. 51-62)

Contextualising the IT artefact: towards a wider research agenda for IS using institutional theory
by Wendy Currie (pp. 63-77)

Why did they do that? Variability in routine transactions
by Michael J. Davern and Carla L. Wilkin (pp. 78-88)

The full ITP back catalogue (going back to 1982) is now available online
- see http://www.emeraldinsight.com/0959-3845.htm

IT and People now has a web-based review management system. Submit your
paper and track its progress on the website http://www.itandpeople.org

During 2008 the most popular articles published in ITP were downloaded
over 1000 times.

Edgar A. Whitley, Robert Davison and Kevin Crowston Co-editors,
Information Technology & People


Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic
communications disclaimer:
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/secretariat/legal/disclaimer.htm

PhD positions in ICT on Formal Verification via SMT available in Trento

Our Erasmus Mundus Partner University Trento is offering

Doctoral Student Positions in Information and Communication Technologies on the research project "WORD-LEVEL FORMAL VERIFICATION VIA SMT SOLVING"


are available at the International Doctorate School in Information and Communication Technologies (http://www.ict.unitn.it/) of the University of Trento, Italy, under the joint supervision of

Dr. ALESSANDRO CIMATTI,
Embedded Systems Research Unit,
FBK-Irst,
via Sommarive 18, I-38100 Povo, Trento, Italy
http://sra.fbk.eu/people/cimatti/,
Prof. ROBERTO SEBASTIANI
Software Engineering & Formal Methods Research Program
DISI, University of Trento,
via Sommarive 14, I-38100 Povo, Trento, Italy
http://disi.unitn.it/~rseba/.

The research activity will be carried out jointly within the Embedded Systems (ES) Research Unit of the Center for Scientific and Technological Research of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Trento, and the Software Engineering & Formal Methods (SE&FM) Research Program,
at Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) of University of Trento.

The research activity will aim at investigating and developing novel techniques, methodologies and support tools for Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) for the verification of WORD-level circuit designs. This work will be part of the "Word-Level Formal Verification via SMT
Solving" (WOLFLING) project, a three-year custom research project supported by SRC/GRC (http://grc.src.org/fr/S200802_Call.asp), in strict collaboration with the Formal Verification Group at Intel, Haifa.

SMT tools will be developed on top of the MathSAT SMT platform (http://mathsat4.disi.unitn.it), and Formal Verification tools will be
developed on top of the NuSMV Model Checking platform (http://nusmv.fbk.eu).
Both platforms are jointly developed and maintained by ES and SE&FM.

The selected candidates will be initially enrolled in a stage and, if they pass the selection of the Ph.D. school, they will be enrolled as Ph.D. students. Ph.D. courses will start in Autumn 2009, and the thesis must be completed in three or four years. People enrolled in a stage and subsequent Ph.D. courses are expected to move to Trento, and will receive monetary support during both phases of their activity.

Candidate Profile
=================

The ideal candidate should have an MS or equivalent degree in computer science, mathematics or electronic engineering, and combine solid theoretical background and excellent software development skills.

The candidate should be able to work in a collaborative environment, with a strong commitment to reaching research excellence and achieving assigned objectives.

Background knowledge and/or previous experience in the following areas (in order of preference), though not mandatory, will be considered very favorably:
- Satisfiability Modulo Theory (SMT)
- Propositional Satisfiability (SAT)
- Embedded Systems Design Languages (e.g. Verilog, VHDL)
- Symbolic Model Checking
- Automated Reasoning
- Constraint Solving and Optimization

Applications and Inquiries
==========================

Interested candidates should inquire for further information and/or apply by sending email to Prof. Sebastiani rseba[at]disi[dot]unitn[dot]it.

Applications should contain a statement of interest, with a Curriculum Vitae, and three reference persons. PDF format is strongly encouraged. Emails will be automatically processed and should have

'PHD ON WOLFLING PROJECT'

as subject.

Contact Person
==============

Prof. ROBERTO SEBASTIANI
Software Engineering & Formal Methods Research Program
DISI, University of Trento,
via Sommarive 14, I-38100 Povo, Trento, Italy
http://disi.unitn.it/~rseba/.
mailto: rseba[at]disi[dot]unitn[dot]it

Graph-Hoc

First Workshop on Applications of Graph Theory in Wireless Ad hoc Networks
and Sensor Networks (GRAPH-HOC 09)

This one-day workshop focuses on the applications of graph theory in different areas of wireless ad hoc networks such as Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) and sensor networks. Graph theoretic concepts are applied in several fundamental issues such as connectivity, data gathering, routing, mobility, energy efficiency and topology control. Papers submitted for the workshop should focus on a problem that is of both theoretical as well as practical interest in the area of ad hoc networks and sensor networks. This workshop will thus provide a platform for researchers from both theoretical and practical domains of ad hoc networks to meet and exchange their ideas. Topics of interest include (but not limited to):

Distributed extensions of centralized graph theoretic routing algorithms
Connectivity analysis under different mobility models
Data gathering algorithms and protocols for sensor networks
Applications of Random Graph theory in ad hoc networks and sensor networks
Algorithms for scheduling and resource allocation problems
Algorithms for topology control and power assignment
Evacuation routing algorithms and protocols for vehicular ad hoc networks
Secure routing algorithms and protocols based on graph theory
Approximation heuristics for NP-complete problems related to ad hoc networks

Submission Details:

Papers should be submitted as PDF files using the IEEE Computer Society Proceedings format (two columns, 10-point Times New Roman font, single-spaced, US letter and all margins no smaller than one inch). Papers should also include (i) a 175-250 word abstract (ii) five to eight key words identifying the graph theoretic and application areas that are relevant to the paper
(iii) Name and affiliation information for all authors and the contact information (email address) of one of the authors.

Papers should be submitted via email to gt_adhoc@airccse.org

The maximum number of pages for a paper submitted for both review and publication should be six. There can be two additional pages, with an extra cost of $125 per page.

For each accepted paper, at least one of the authors should have completed full registration for the NetCom 2009 conference in order for the paper to be published in the workshop and conference proceedings.

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline: June 20, 2009
Authors Notification: August 20, 2009
Final Manuscript Due: September 20, 2009

Fraunhofer FIT seeks Student Researcher for UbiComp Prototyping

Fraunhofer FIT seeks Student Researcher for UbiComp Prototyping

Fraunhofer FIT seeks Student Researcher for FireSim Engine

Fraunhofer FIT seeks Student Researcher for FireSim Engine

Monday, April 27, 2009

PROLEARN Academy Newsletter 2009: Week 18

*** New Call For Papers

CATS2009
Call-Art: Workshop, Paper submission deadline: May 08, 2009
2nd workshop on Culturally-Aware Tutoring Systems Socio-Cultural Issues in Artificial Intelligence in Education

Special issue on Adaptive technologies and methods in e/m-Learning and Internet
Call-Art: Publication, Paper submission deadline: May 22, 2009
DEADLINE EXTENDED Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (JCAL) Special Issue on Adaptive technologies and methods in e/m-Learning and Internet-based education

IGI Int'l. Journal of Creative Interfaces & Computer Graphics
Call-Art: Publication, Paper submission deadline: Dec 01, 2009
*CALL FOR PAPERS* on topics spanning creative and advanced computer graphics and human-computer interfaces, across mobile, Web, desktop, and ambient spaces. See http://www.igi-global.com/IJCICG

3. Workshop Pervasive University - PerU 2009
Call-Art: Workshop, Paper submission deadline: Apr 26, 2009
im Rahmen der 39. GI Jahrestagung Lübeck, 28. September - 02. Oktober2009 mit Unterstützung der GI-Fachgruppen APS+PC und E-Learning

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


*** PROLEARN Academy - Measure

Our auto observation tool for scientific communities contains at present 1548 projects, of which 235 are newsfeeds, 95 newsletters, 495 web sites, 68 mailinglists and 655 blogs. The number of caught entries totals 126616 for the feeds, of which 5149 were retrieved last week. For the newsletters totals 3604 entries, of which 23 were retrieved last week, for the mailinglists there are 101950 entries, of which 454 last week and for the blogs there are 229246 entries, of which 704 last week.

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

We are continuously enlarging our project database.


*** Last week were added 19 new projects. These are the following:

7 Web Pages

Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content | Adopting Standards and Specifications for Educational Content

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in English

Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten
Podcast!!
Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in German

Learning and Entertainment Evolution Forum - 2009

Category: N.A.; in English

Campus Content - Startseite

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in German

Bloom's Taxonomy

Category: N.A.; in English

The European Future Technologies Conference - FET09 - Exhibition | Europa - Information Society

Category: Applied Science, Technology, Medicine; in English

ROLE » The Project

Category: Applied Science, Technology, Medicine; in English


12 Blogs

Learning Support Blog

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in German

Social Enterprise Blog

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in English

Education - Change.org

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in English

e-Denkarium

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in German

Reflections on E-learning Development

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in English

Learning with 'e's

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in English

Sarah's Musings

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in English

Karen Johnson: interested in education, creativity, ICT, media

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in English

It's all about the coffee - e-Learning Stuff

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in English

TracyOteacher

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in English

Brains | working towards machine consciousness

Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in English

Engaged Learning
Social Learning
Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in English

WI/IAT'09 Workshop on Social and Personal Computing for Web-Supported Learning Communities (SPeL 2009)

2nd International Workshop on Social and Personal Computing
for Web-Supported Learning Communities (SPeL 2009)
http://software.ucv.ro/~popescu_elvira/spel2009/


in conjunction with The 2009 IEEE / WIC / ACM International Conferences
on Web Intelligence (WI'09) and Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT'09)


http://www.wi-iat09.disco.unimib.it/
Milan, ITALY
15-18 September 2009


Motivation
==========

The workshop follows the previous SPeL 2008 workshop
(http://software.ucv.ro/~popescu_elvira/spel2008), held in conjunction
with the SAINT 2008 conference. The workshop combines research in the area
of e-Learning, Social Networks and Social Intelligence, and Web
Personalization and focuses this year on the application of Web
Intelligence research paradigm to the next generation of e-learning systems.

Web-based learning is moving from a centralized, institution-based system
to a decentralized and informal creation and sharing of knowledge. Social
software (e.g., blogs, wikis, podcasts, and media-sharing services) has
started to be used for e-learning purposes, helping to create novel
learning experiences. In the world of pervasive Internet, learners are
also evolving: the so-called "digital natives" want to be in constant
communication with their peers, they expect an individualized instruction
and a personalized learning environment, which automatically adapt to
their individual needs.

This workshop deals with current research on e-learning as an intelligent
e-technology, more specifically the challenges of social and
personalization aspects in Web-supported learning communities. Its aim is
to provide a forum for discussing new trends and initiatives in this area,
including research about the planning, development, application, and
evaluation of intelligent learning environments, where people can learn
together in a personalized way.


Topics of interest
==================

The workshop welcomes submissions covering all aspects of Web Intelligence
related to social and personal computing in web-based learning
communities, including (but not limited to):

- Web 2.0 and social computing for learning
- Virtual spaces for learning communities
- Web supported ubiquitous learning
- Service-oriented computing for e-learning
- Ontologies and semantic Web for e-learning
- Mobile e-learning applications
- Intelligent learner and group modeling
- Adaptive and personalized learning environments
- Adaptive Web interfaces for learning scenarios
- Cognitive aspects in intelligent web-based learning systems
- Web mining in learning settings
- Collaborative filtering and recommendations for learners
- Web-based cooperative learning
- Intelligent agent technology in web-based education
- Pervasive e-learning scenarios
- Knowledge community formation and support
- Lifelong learning networks
- Social software for collaborative learning
- Socially intelligent agents
- Semantic social networks
- Community discovering in social learning systems
- Social structure exploitation in e-learning
- Socially-inspired e-learning systems


Paper subsmission and publication
=================================

The length of the workshop papers should not exceed 4 pages, IEEE-CS
format (extra payment is available for one more extra page).

The Proceedings of the Workshop will be published by the IEEE Computer
Society Press (indexed by IEEE Xplore, EI, INSPEC).

Selected papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of
the International Journal of Information Systems and Social Change
(IJISSC) (http://www.igi-global.com/ijissc).

Please follow the instructions on the WI 2009 website
(http://www.wi-iat09.disco.unimib.it/WI09/submission.htm), where you can
find the Manuscript Formatting Guidelines.


Important dates
===============

April 30, 2009 Workshop paper submission
June 10, 2009 Workshop paper notification
June 30, 2009 Camera ready paper
September 15, 2009 SPeL 2009 workshop


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

Costin Badica, University of Craiova, Romania
Dumitru Dan Burdescu, University of Craiova, Romania
Alexandra Cristea, University of Warwick, UK
Michael Derntl, University of Vienna, Austria
Adrian Giurca, BTU Cottbus, Germany
Andreas Holzinger, Medical University Graz, Austria
Ian Kennedy, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Tania Kerkiri, University of Macedonia, Greece
Kinshuk, Athabasca University, Canada
Vive Kumar, Athabasca University & Simon Fraser University, Canada Chung
Hsien Lan, Nanya Institute of Technology, Taiwan
Chien-Sing Lee, Multimedia University, Malaysia
Howard Leung, City University of Hong Kong, HK
Frederick Li, University of Durham, UK
Oscar Lin, Athabasca University, Canada
Alessandro Longheu, University of Catania, Italy
Giuseppe Mangioni, University of Catania, Italy
Constantinos Mourlas, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens,
Greece Toshio Okamoto, University of Electro-Communications, Japan
Angela-M. Paleologou, University of Ioannina, Greece
Timothy K. Shih, National Taipei University of Education, Taiwan
Jirarat Sitthiworachart, Walailak University, Thailand
Julita Vassileva, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
Stephen J.H. Yang, National Central University, Taiwan


Organizers
==========

Elvira Popescu - University of Craiova (Romania)
Sabine Graf - National Central University (Taiwan)


Please visit the workshop web site
(http://software.ucv.ro/~popescu_elvira/spel2009/) for further details.

LRE Journal: Special Issue on Plagiarism and Authorship Analysis. New Deadline.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Language Resources and Evaluation Journal

Special Issue on Plagiarism and Authorship Analysis

Guest Editors: Efstathios Stamatatos, Benno Stein, and Moshe Koppel

The vast number of electronic texts available in Internet media (e.g.,
newspaper articles, blogs, online forum messages, email messages)
necessitates automated processing of information. However, it also
increases opportunities for infringement of intellectual property
rights. One important question is whether a text by a specific author
includes another author's ideas, language, or writing without proper
acknowledgment of the original source. Plagiarism analysis is a general
term for a variety of automated methods for identifying plagiarism and
related infringements. In connection with text documents, we distinguish
between corpus-based and intrinsic analysis: the former compares suspicious
documents against a set of potential original documents, the latter
identifies potentially plagiarized passages by analyzing the suspicious
document with respect to changes in writing style. Such passages can then
be used as a starting point for a Web search or for human inspection. In
addition, writing style can also be exploited by authorship analysis tools
to extract meta-data for a textual document. Thus, by analyzing the
stylistic choices of an author, it is possible to estimate the author's
sex, age, educational level etc. Moreover, given that we have examples of
the writing style of a set of candidate authors, we can identify the most
likely author of a new text or verify whether this text is written by a
specific author. Apart from the traditional usage of this technology in the
analysis of literary works, such information is crucial for forensic
applications where part of the evidence is electronic text.


This special issue solicits state-of-the-art methods, tools, and
applications in the area of Plagiarism and Authorship Analysis. The
following list gives examples from the outlined field for which
contributions are welcome (but not limited to):

- Plagiarism detection in general, in Web communities and social
networks

- Cross-language plagiarism

- Identifying near-duplicate and versioned documents

- Technology for high-similarity retrieval such as fingerprinting and
similarity hashing

- Models for authorship identification and verification

- Writing style analysis and author profiling

- NLP- and knowledge-based retrieval models to capture personal traits
and sentiment

- Web forensics, community fraud, and new Web infringements

- Test corpora, performance measures, and evaluation methods

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Prospective authors should submit their paper according to the directions
on the LRE Web site

http://www.icsd.aegean.gr/lecturers/Stamatatos/LRE.htm

Submissions will be reviewed according to the standards of the LRE
journal. Papers should not have been submitted or published elsewhere but
may be extended or refined versions of conference papers with significant
new, original material.

Prospective authors are advised to inform the guest editors about their
intention to submit a paper as soon as possible.

All questions about submissions should be directed to lre@webis.de

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
IMPORTANT DATES
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

May 17, 2009 Submission of articles
July 1, 2009 Notification to authors
August 31, 2009 Final version of accepted papers

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
GUEST EDITORS
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Efstathios Stamatatos
University of the Aegean, Greece

Benno Stein
Weimar University, Germany

Moshe Koppel
Bar-Ilan University, Israel

Contact: lre@webis.de

Scalable Uncertainty Management Conference 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS

Third International Conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management

Washington DC, USA, September 28-30, 2009

http://wwwinfo.deis.unical.it/~apugliese/SUM2009

A large amount of available data nowadays includes uncertain,
imprecise, and inconsistent information. The possibility of
integrating and exploiting these data calls for sound and efficient
techniques for managing uncertainty and handling inconsistency. These
issues, which have been traditionally addressed within the Artificial
Intelligence community, already play a key role in fields like
databases or the semantic Web.

The annual International Conference on Scalable Uncertainty Management
(SUM), grown out of this large interest in uncertainty and
inconsistency, aims at bringing together all those interested in the
management of uncertainty and inconsistency at large, fostering the
collaboration and cross-fertilization between the reasoning under
uncertainty community and the databases and semantic Web communities.

SUM 2009 is the third edition of the International Conference on
Scalable Uncertainty Management, following the successful previous
editions SUM 2007 in Washington DC, USA, and SUM 2008 in Naples,
Italy.

Submissions are solicited in all areas of massive uncertainty and
inconsistency, including (but not restricted to) the topics listed
below:

- probability logic
- fuzzy logic
- annotated logic
- Bayesian models
- Markov models
- possibilistic logic
- paraconsistent logic
- semantics of uncertain data
- formal models of uncertain data
- reasoning with uncertain and inconsistent information
- spatio-temporal uncertainty management
- probabilistic databases
- inconsistent databases
- uncertainty and inconsistency in the Web and in the Semantic Web
- uncertain database algebras
- query optimization with uncertainty
- query caching for uncertain databases
- indexing methods for uncertainty
- uncertain aggregate queries
- uncertainty in view management
- skyline query processing
- top-k queries and ranking
- approximate query processing
- uncertainty in data integration and exchange
- uncertainty in data streams
- uncertainty in information retrieval
- data sharing and uncertainty
- approximate schema and ontology mapping
- similarity in ontology languages
- similarity search and extraction
- information extraction
- vision and uncertainty
- audio processing and uncertainty
- multimedia and uncertainty
- text and uncertainty
- mobile systems and uncertainty
- image, speech, multimedia, and text information retrieval
- mining image, speech, multimedia, and text data
- personalization and user preferences
- mining in social networks
- uncertainty and trust issues
- ranking in information retrieval
- matchmaking and negotiation
- novel applications and systems

We especially want to encourage submissions from uncertainty and
inconsistency management in databases, as well as from uncertainty and
inconsistency handling in the Web and the Semantic Web. We seek both
theoretical and practical works.


General Chairs

Henri Prade (IRIT, France)
V.S. Subrahmanian (University of Maryland, USA)


Program co-chairs

Lluis Godo (IIIA, Spain)
Andrea Pugliese (University of Calabria, Italy)


Program Committee

Chitta Baral (Arizona State University, USA)
Leopoldo Bertossi (Carleton University, Canada)
Salem Benferhat (University of Artois, France)
Bir Bhanu (University of California-Riverside, USA)
Fabio Gagliardi Cozman (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil)
Michael I. Dekhtyar (Tver State University, Russia)
Jürgen Dix (TU Clausthal, Germany)
Francesco Donini (University of Tuscia, Italy)
Didier Dubois (IRIT, France)
Thomas Eiter (TU Vienna, Austria)
Nicola Fanizzi (University of Bari, Italy)
Filippo Furfaro (University of Calabria, Italy)
John Grant (Towson University, USA)
Sergio Greco (University of Calabria, Italy)
Pascal Hitzler (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Eyke Hüllermeier (University of Marburg, Germany)
Edward Hung (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Anthony Hunter (University College London, UK)
T.S. Jayram (IBM Almaden Research Center, USA)
Churn-Jung Liau (Academia Sinica, Taiwan)
Weiru Liu (Queen's University Belfast, UK)
Thomas Lukasiewicz (Oxford University, UK; TU Vienna, Austria)
Serafin Moral (University of Granada, Spain)
Dan Olteanu (Oxford University, UK)
Gabriella Pasi (University of Milan-Bicocca, Italy)
Olivier Pivert (INRIA-ENSSAT, France)
Michael Pittarelli (State University of New York, USA)
David Poole (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Henri Prade (IRIT, France)
Emad Saad (Gulf University of Science and Technology, Kuwait)
Domenico Saccà (ICAR-CNR, Italy)
Maria Luisa Sapino (University of Turin, Italy)
Prakash Shenoy (University of Kansas, USA)
Umberto Straccia (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
Heiner Stuckenschmidt (University of Mannheim, Germany)
V.S. Subrahmanian (University of Maryland, USA)
Maurice van Keulen (University of Twente, The Netherlands)
Peter Vojtás (Charles University, Czech Republic)
Nic Wilson (University College Cork, Ireland)


Invited speakers

Amol Deshpande (University of Maryland, USA)
Thomas Lukasiewicz (Oxford University, UK; TU Vienna, Austria)


Publication

The proceedings will be published by Springer as a volume in the
Lecture Notes in Computer Science/Lecture Notes in Artificial
Intelligence (LNCS/LNAI) series and will be available at the
conference. After the conference, we are also planning to edit a
special issue of a journal with selected papers from the conference.


Submission of papers

Submissions must be typeset using the Springer LaTeX2e style llncs for
Lecture Notes in Computer Science. The length should not exceed 12 pages
for full papers and 6 pages for short papers. Short papers should be
clearly marked as such in the title and in the easychair submission
system. Submissions which deviate substantially from these guidelines
may be rejected without review. Submissions will especially be judged
for originality and scientific quality. All accepted papers will be
included in the proceedings.


Important dates

Paper submission deadline: May 20, 2009
Accept/reject decisions: July 3, 2009
Camera ready papers due: July 10, 2009
Last day for author registration: July 30, 2009
Last day for early registration fee: September 1, 2009

Search in Social Media 2009 (at SIGIR 2009)

Workshop on Search in Social Media (SSM 2009)
23 July 2009 in Boston, MA
Co-located with SIGIR 2009
http://ir.mathcs.emory.edu/SSM2009/


Social applications are the fastest growing segment of the web. They
establish new forums for content creation, allow people to connect to
each other and share information, and permit novel applications at the
intersection of people and information. However, to date, social media
has been primarily popular for connecting people, not for finding
information. While there has been progress on searching particular
kinds of social media, such as blogs, search in others (e.g.,
Facebook, Myspace, of flickr) are not as well understood.

The purpose of this workshop is to bring together information
retrieval and social media researchers to consider the following
questions: How should we search in social media? What are the needs of
users, and models of those needs, specific to social media search?
What models make the most sense? How does search interact with
existing uses of social media? How can social media search complement
traditional web search? What new search paradigms for information
finding can be facilitated by social media?

Search in Social Media 2009 follows up on the highly successful SSM
2008 workshop held at CIKM 2008 in Napa, CA. Nearly 50 attendees from
academia and industry gathered for an informative and interactive day
of talks, panels, and discussion. We are looking forward to an
equally exciting workshop at SIGIR 2009 in Boston!

We solicit submissions on topics at the intersection of information
finding and social media, including, but not limited to:

* Searching blogs, tweets, and other textual social media.
* Searching within social networks, including expert finding.
* Searching Wikipedia discussions and revision histories.
* Searching online discussions, mailing lists, forums, and community
question answering sites.
* The role of human-powered and community question answering.
* Novel models of information finding and new search applications for
social media.
* The role of timeliness, authority, and accuracy in social media
search.
* Interaction between traditional web search and social media search.
* User needs assessments and task analysis for social media search.
* Usability studies of people using social media search tools.
* Interactions between searching and browsing in social media.
* Searching and exploiting folksonomies, tags, and tagged data.
* Spam and adversarial interactions in social media

Ideal papers may include late-breaking and novel research results,
position and vision papers discussing the role of search in social
media, and demonstrations of prototypes or working systems. The
workshop notes will not be formally published but will be distributed
at the workshop, and will be archived at the workshop website and/or
Arxiv.

All submissions (research papers, position papers, and demo proposals)
are limited to a maximum of 4 pages. Submissions must be in PDF
format and follow the ACM Conference style guidelines
(http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates). The URL
for submissions is http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ssm2009

Important Dates

* June 16: submissions due
* June 29: notification of acceptance
* July 9: final papers due
* July 23: Workshop (full day)

Organizers

* Eugene Agichtein, Emory University
* Marti Hearst, University of California, Berkeley
* Ian Soboroff, NIST

Program Committee

Eytan Adar, University of Washington
Ed Chi, Xerox PARC
Abdur Chowdhury, Twitter
Natalie Glance, Google
Bernardo Huberman, HP Labs
Matthew Hurst, Microsoft Live Labs
Pranam Kolari, Yahoo! Labs
Craig Macdonald, University of Glasgow
Gilad Mishne, Yahoo! Labs
Doug Oard, University of Maryland
Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow
Nitya Narasimhan, Motorola Labs
Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam
Markus Strohmaier, TU Graz
Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo!