Complex Systems and Computational Social Sciences - New PhD Thematic Programme in Dublin

Complex Systems and Computational Social Sciences

Thematic PhD Programme

University College Dublin

UCD Geary Institute invites applications for September 2009 for a new Thematic Doctoral Programme in Complex Systems and Computational Social Sciences. (CSCS)

The CSCS PhD programme is a four year thematic, structured programme commencing in the Academic Year 2009/2010. Staff involved in the programme are drawn from a variety of research groups in both UCD Geary Institute and UCD Complex and Adaptive Systems Laboratory, as well as from the Schools of Business, Mathematical Sciences, Computer Science and Informatics, Engineering, Economics, Politics and International Relations and Sociology.

The programme incorporates a range of taught modules, followed by a program of original research leading to the award of Doctoral degree by research. CSCS students may also participate in short, external internships during the four year programme.

Entry to the CSCS programme requires an undergraduate degree in suitable disciplines in the social sciences, mathematical and/or computer science or closely related areas. Applicants from other disciplines may also be admitted, under certain circumstances .

Further details, including application procedure, are available at http://geary.ucd.ie/cscs/. Closing date for receipt of applications is Monday 15 June 2009.

New Book: "Representation and Management of Narrative Information"

Gian Piero ZARRI
Representation and Management of Narrative Information, Theoretical Principles and Implementation
Series: Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing
2009, X, 302 p. 55 illus., Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-84800-077-3
Springer-Verlag London
http://www.springer.com/computer/artificial/book/978-1-84800-077-3


A big amount of important, economically relevant information, is buried within the huge mass of multimedia documents that correspond to some form of 'narrative' description.

Due to the ubiquity of these narrative resources, representing in a general, accurate, and effective way their semantic content - i.e., their key 'meaning' - is then both conceptually relevant and economically important. In this book, we present the main properties of NKRL ('Narrative Knowledge Representation Language'), a language expressly designed for representing and managing, in a standardised way, the 'meaning' of complex multimedia narrative documents. NKRL is also a fully implemented environment that exists in two versions: a relational database-supported version and a file-oriented one. It constitutes probably the most complete and realistic effort realised so far to deal with the huge industrial potentialities of the narrative domain.

Written from a multidisciplinary perspective, this book not only supplies an exhaustive description of NKRL and of the associated knowledge representation principles, it also constitutes a source of reference for practitioners, researchers and graduates in domains that range over narrative theories, linguistics and computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, knowledge bases, information retrieval, and languages for the ontologies and the semantic web.

Contents:

- Narratology and NKRL.
- The notion of 'event' in an NKRL context.
- Knowledge representation and NKRL.
- Architecture of NKRL, the four 'components'.
- Primitives and semantic roles.
- Second order structures.
- The semantic and ontological contents.
- Ontology of 'concepts' and ontology of 'events'.
- The query and inference procedures.
- Temporal information and indexing.
- High-level inference procedures.
- Technological enhancements and theoretical enhancements.
- Appendix A: NKRL software.
- Appendix B: Plural entities in NKRL.


Professional address of the author from February 1st, 2009:

Gian Piero Zarri
University Paris-Est - LISSI Laboratory
120-122, rue Paul Armangot
94400 Vitry-sur-Seine
France
Phone: 33-1-41807383
Fax: 33-1-41807369
Email: zarri@noos.fr, gian-piero.zarri@univ-paris12.fr

3rd Workshop on Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics

3rd Workshop on Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics

Hyatt Regency Mission Bay Spa and Marina
San Diego, California, USA
December 14-16, 2009
https://www-itec.uni-klu.ac.at/ms09/

The 3rd Workshop on Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics will be a one-day workshop to be held during the IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM’09, http://ism2009.eecs.uci.edu/). It will take place in Dec. 2009 in San Diego, USA.

Objectives
==========

Information is increasingly becoming ubiquitous and all-pervasive, with the World-Wide Web as its primary repository. The rapid growth of information on the Web creates new challenges for information retrieval. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the investigation and
development of the next generation web – the Semantic Web.

Multimedia information has always been part of the Semantic Web paradigm, but, in general, has been discussed very simplistically by the Semantic Web community. We believe that, rather than trying to discover a media object’s hidden meaning, one should formulate ways of managing
media objects so as to help people make more intelligent use of them. The relationship between users and media objects should be studied. Media objects should be interpreted relative to the particular goal or point-of-view of a particular user at a particular time.

Content-based descriptors are necessary to this process. At the same time, such descriptions are definitely not sufficient. Context is also important, and should be managed. The area of emergent multimedia semantics has been initiated to study the measured interactions between users and media objects, with the ultimate goal of trying to satisfy the user community by providing them with the media objects they require, based on their individual previous media interactions.

The arrival of Web 2.0 has added new paradigms to the media mix. Such concepts as folksonomies, a form of emergent semantics, introduce a collaborative, dynamic approach to the generation of ontologies and media object semantics. That such an approach results in a stable
semantics, though surprising, has been recently demonstrated.

As one can see, the field of multimedia semantics is in great flux at the present time. Approaches which seek to unify these disparate disciplines are especially necessary.

This will be a one-day workshop to be held during ISM’09. Besides the standard research contributions, there will also be a poster session and a session devoted to the presentation of results from current Ph.D. students, as well as a keynote talk. Based on last year’s workshop, the
keynote will include discussions of necessary research agendas which will bring together important subsets of the research communities working on multimedia semantics, the Semantic Web, and Web 2.0. Best papers of this workshop will be published in IEEE Multimedia.


List of Topics
==============

We welcome all papers relevant to topics in multimedia semantics, including those at the confluence of multimedia information management, the Semantic Web, and Web 2.0, such as,

* Computational semiotics
* Conceptual clustering
* Emergent semantics in the social web
* Event representation and detection
* Folksonomies in social media sharing
* Genre detection
* Industrial use-cases and applications
* Intelligent browsing and visualization
* Media ontology learning
* Media mining in the social web
* Modeling and recognition of visual objects and actions
* Multimedia management and consumption in communities
* Multimedia extraction and social annotation
* Multimedia ontologies for the social web
* Multisensory data integration and fusion for decision making
* Perception and cognition in the context of Web 2.0
* Semantic metadata for mobile applications
* Semantics enabled multimedia applications (including search, browsing, retrieval, visualization) for the social web
* Social networking
* Spectral methods
* Standards for the social web
* User interfaces

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

* 11:59 PM EST, July 20, 2009 — Submissions due
* August 20, 2009 — Acceptance notification
* September 25, 2009 — Camera-ready papers due


Contact
=======

For further information. informal requests or questions please contactthe workshop organizers:

* Farshad Fotouhi, Wayne State University, fotouhi@wayne.edu
* William Grosky, University of Michigan-Dearborn, wgrosky@umich.edu
* Mathias Lux, Klagenfurt University, mlux@itec.uni-klu.ac.at
* Peter Stanchev, Kettering University, pstanche@kettering.edu

VLDBJ Special Issue on Social Networks and Social Media

Call for Papers

Special Issue of the VLDB Journal on

"Data Management and Mining for Social Networks and Social Media"

*** Detailed submission instructions are now available, please see below. In particular, you must register your submission one week before the paper deadline, please follow the instructions below. ***

AIMS AND SCOPE
--------------
Social networks have become appealing to most of us. User-generated content and social media are rapidly becoming a part of more and more of our digital experience, ranging from resource discovery to entertainment. Both social networks and social media are notions whose influence and significance go beyond computer science. Harnessing these technologies at once offers great
possibilities for society and significant technical challenges. The challenges range from diversity of the data (e.g., text and images of various kinds, links), to demanding system requirements (e.g., throughput, robustness, scalability), to enhanced information discovery paradigms, to
sophisticated analysis and mining, and to exciting new opportunities (e.g., online exchange markets). Currently, there is literally an explosion of research into various aspects of social networks and social media. The aim of this special issue is to bring out a slice of the state of the art on these exciting topics and suggest directions for future research.

TOPICS OF INTERESTS
-------------------
The special issue will serve as a forum for recent advances in the field of social networks and social media, from the perspectives of data management and mining. We invite original and high quality submissions addressing all aspects of this field. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Query languages for social networks and social media
- Query processing and optimization
- Search in social networks and social media
- Interoperability between social applications and social media
- Techniques for social-network analysis and for the analysis of social-media phenomena
- Recommendations, reputation, credibility and trust in social media
- Privacy in the context of social networks and social media
- Architectural and systems issues
- New opportunities
- Monetization (advertizing, subscriptions, etc.)

GUEST EDITORS
--------------
Klemens Böhm, Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Germany (boehm at ipd dot uka dot de)
Laks V.S. Lakshmanan, The University of British Columbia, Canada (laks at cs dot ubc dot ca)

IMPORTANT DATES
----------------
- Abstract submissions: August 08, 2009
- Paper submissions: August 15, 2009
- First round notification: December 15, 2009
- Revised versions: February 10, 2010
- Second round notifications: April 15, 2010
- Final version: June 1st, 2010
- Publication target: volume 19, issue 5 (September 2010)

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
---------------------
To register an abstract, please go to http://www.ipd.uni-karlsruhe.de/~thier/insert-entry.php. To submit the paper itself (this will be possible after August 08 until the deadline), go to
http://www.editorialmanager.com/vldb/ and follow the instructions there.

Note that the standard VLDB Journal instructions for authors apply. In particular, there is a 25-page limit in the two-column camera-ready format of the journal. The standard instructions are available at: http://www.editorialmanager.com/vldb/

ABOUT THE JOURNAL
-----------------
The VLDB Journal is published on behalf of the VLDB Endowment. The journal is dedicated to the publication of scholarly contributions to the advancement of information system architectures, the impact of technological advancements on information systems, and the development of novel database applications. The journal was launched in July 1992 and is now published jointly by Springer-Verlag and ACM, electronically and in print.

International Seminar "Social Theory and Dynamic Network Analysis"

The International Seminar "Social Theory and Dynamic Network Analysis" will be held in July 10, 2009 at the UAB (Barcelona) as a part of the ECRP-DANL project (http://stat.gamma.rug.nl/ECRP-DANL/default.htm).

This Seminar is intended for researchers and graduate students interested in Social Theory and Social Network Dynamics. The aim of the Seminar is to gain a better understanding of both epistemological and methodological dimensions of longitudinal network data in order to contribute to Social Theory development. The seminar includes presentations focused on theoretical issues from Michel Grossetti (Toulouse, CNRS) and Claire Bidart (Aix-en-Provence, CNRS), and applications to substantive case studies using SIENA.

More information: http://seneca.uab.es/antropologia/Egoredes/international_seminar_bcn.html

DEADLINE EXTENSION: ISDA 2009 Special Session, on Tags and Recommendations in Web 2.0: TR-WEB2.0

Special Session

TR-WEB2.0: Tags and Recommendations in Web 2.0

(http://ailab.dimi.uniud.it/en/events/2009/tr-web20/)

in connection with

ISDA 2009, November 30 - December 2, 2009, Pisa, Italy

Web site: http://ailab.dimi.uniud.it/en/events/2009/ap-web20/

Contact e-mail: mailto: tr-web20@dimi.uniud.it

!!! Paper submission deadline extended: June 20th, 2009!!!

DESCRIPTION

Motivation

The Web 2.0 world provides users with tools for generating a growing and meaningful part of Web contents; in fact, everyday an increasing number of users collaborates by sharing/publishing resources, associating tags on documents, and remixing existing contents. This process of information and knowledge construction increases the amount of resources making hard manual tasks such as the retrieval of interesting contents, or the selection of meaningful tags for classifying documents.

Collaborative tagging systems, such as del.icio.us or bibsonomy, are popular examples of tools, which allow users to conceptualize, describe, and share resources. Users can assign a set of tags simplifying the search of bookmarked resources and providing indications to other peers. But, actually there is not effective usage of tags: typically tags are applied just for a personal consumption and people associate different meaning to the same tag; tagging systems are not based on well defined vocabularies, and so many tags do not provide any help to a user.

Recommender systems aim at reducing the effort required to users, by modeling users’ preferences and goals. The Web 2.0 philosophy creates a new role for the user which can be modeled both as a consumer of information and as a producer of new contents. But the development of recommendation frameworks based on the analysis of tags is still an open challenge.

This special session aims at discussing the state-of-art, open problems, challenges and innovative approaches in designing and developing intelligent mechanism for personalized collaborative tagging systems. In particular, we are interested in algorithms and frameworks able to model users in social tagging environment and provide user with tags for simplifying the organization of interesting resources and with suggestions concerning resources filling the users information needs.

Objectives

This special session aims at discussing the state-of-the-art, open problems, challenges and innovative research approaches in recommending tags and resources in social tagging systems.

Examples of stimulating application fields are recommendation in social bookmarking environments, publication sharing systems, or, more in general, digital libraries 2.0.

Three specific questions motivate this special session:

1. How users’ interests, goals and preferences can be modeled in social tagging systems?

2. What models, techniques, and tools are the most adequate in order to overcome folksonomies’ limitations and to provide plausible and useful recommendations?

3. How much the usage of tags for generating recommendations can improve results of other existing recommender systems?

TOPICS

The topics of interest for the workshop are listed below. All them have to be considered in the context of social tagging systems.

Topics not explicitly listed below, which anyway adhere to the goals of the special session, will be considered as well.

General

* Intelligent tag recommendation in social tagging systems

* Recommending new contents using tags

* Algorithms and metrics for recommendation in social tagging systems

* Personalized ranking

* User profile construction based on tagging and annotations

* Automatic tagging

* Collaborative filtering in social tagging systems

* Social navigation support

* Social search and browsing

* Ontology-based computer supported tagging

* Hybrid recommender systems for tagging

* Evaluating tag recommender systems

* Explanation and evaluation in recommender systems

* Web 2.0 technologies for tag recommender systems

* Scalability problems in tag recommender systems

Interesting application fields

* Publication sharing systems

* Digital libraries 2.0

* Social networks

* Collaborative search engines

* E-Learning and knowledge management environments

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Proceedings

All papers, accepted for this special session, will be included in the proceedings of ISDA'09 and in the IEEE Xplore digital library (IEL, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/). Before publishing your final work at IEL, we need your kind help to ensure the availability and the compatibility of your camera-ready paper.

Formating Instructions

Formating instructions can be foundhere and also templates for Word and LaTeX .

Submission

Authors should submit papers using our EasyChair associated site:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=isda09

Deadlines

Paper submission deadline: May 31th, 2009

Notification of acceptance: July 25th, 2009

Camera-ready copy of accepted paper: September 15th, 2009

COMMITTEES

Program Chairs

Antonina Dattolo - Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Udine, Italy.

Carlo Tasso - Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Udine, Italy.

Program Committee

Robin Burke, DePaul University, Chicago

Peter Dolog, Aalborg University, Denmark

Eelco Herder, L3S Research Center, Hannover, Germany

Gilles Hubert, IRIT, Toulouse, France

Styliani Kleanthous - University of Leeds, UK

Francesco Ricci, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

PierGiuseppe Rossi, University of Macerata, Italy

Giovanni Semeraro, University of Bari, Italy

Fabio Vitali, University of Bologna, Italy

Computer-based Knowledge & Skill Assessment and Feedback in Learning Settings CAF 2009

CAF 2009 - 23. - 24. September 2009 - Villach, Austria

First Special Track on
Computer-based Knowledge & Skill Assessment and Feedback in Learning Settings (CAF)

Online Information: http://www.iicm.edu/CAF2009

This CfP is also available as PDF: http://www.iicm.edu/CAF2009/CAF2009-CfP.pdf

This special track will take place during ICL 2008 in Villach, Austria (23-25 September 2009) as a special program item.

The Special Track CAF 2009 provides an interdisciplinary forum for international scientists and practitioners to discuss various aspects of computer-based knowledge & skill assessment in learning settings and based on that feedback provision for students and teachers.

The International Conference on Interactive Computer aided Learning (ICL) is an interdisciplinary conference which aims to focus on the exchange of relevant trends and research results as well as the presentation of practical experiences in interactive computer aided learning.

Background

Our modern life at the beginning of the 21st century is strongly influenced by effects such as rapidly changing and developing information, technology-enhanced communication and information access, and new forms of production and services in a globalized world. This situation requires individuals to adapt their skills and competencies. Consequently, educational objectives and societal expectations have changed significantly in recent years. Modern learning settings must consider learning community aspects as well as learner-centered, knowledge-centered and assessment-centered aspects.

By focusing on the assessment, this concept can be further distinguished in (1) summative assessment, performed at the end of a set of learning activities, and (2) formative assessment, which is intended to give continuous feedback to students and teachers. The latter mentioned formative assessment gives information about the current state of knowledge and/or the degree of knowledge acquisition within learning activities.

Assessment is an important component of modern teaching and learning processes in face-to-face courses as well as in e-learning environments; it provides valuable feedback to teachers and students which allows the revision and adaptation of teaching and learning activities. Furthermore, assessment activities and results can also be utilized for building and strengthening metacognitive skills. However, continuous and frequent assessment in learning processes may cause excessive efforts and costs. Therefore, computer-assisted assessment systems (CaAS) and computer-based assessment systems (CbAS) have become of increasing interest over the years. Assessment systems may support parts or the entire chain of the assessment lifecycle. This lifecycle includes authoring and management of assessment items, compilation of specific tests, performance of assessments, and compilation and management results. Additionally, emerging interest in the sharing and re-use of assessment items or compiled assessment tests and the exchangeability of assessment outcomes has resulted in standardization efforts, such as the IMS Question & Test Interoperability Specification (IMS QTI).

The special track will bring together international researchers as well as practitioners from different organisations who will have plenty of time for networking and real-world knowledge sharing.

We invite submissions that deal with issues including, but not limited to:

• Aspects of formative and summative assessment
• History and challenges of e-assessment
• Computer-supported assessment rubric
• Computer-based knowledge & skill assessment for individuals and groups
• Computer-supported peer assessment for individuals and groups
• Computer-supported self-assessment and group assessment
• Computer-based student and teacher feedback about knowledge state and acquisition
• Computer-based assessment in adaptive e-learning
• Web 2.0 and assessment & feedback for individual and group learning
• Automated essay grading
• Natural short answer assessment
• Assessment and feedback in computer-based simulations
• Assessment and feedback in game-based learning settings
• Test & training data and evaluation procedures
• Reuse, Interoperability and Standardization
• Security and Privacy

Important Dates

• 21 June 2009: Submission of the full papers (8 pages)
• 31 July 2009: Notification of acceptance
• 31 Aug. 2009: Camera ready version (8 pages)
• 23.-25. Sept. 2009: ICL 2009 Conference

Submission Procedure

File Types: Word for Windows
Language: English (British or US)
Style Guides & Template: http://www.icl-conference.org/template.doc
Paper Submission System: Please use the Electronic Submission Page http://www.conftool.com/icl-conference/

In case of problems or questions concerning the submission of papers, please contact the track chairs at CAF2009@iicm.edu.

Notification of Acceptance and Publishing

Accepted papers will be published within the ICL conference proceedings. At least one author has to register within 2 weeks after the notification of acceptance to be included into the conference programme (15. Aug. 2009). Authors fee is applicable only once per paper!

Some authors will be invited to submit extended versions of their paper for publication in the "European Journal of Open and Distance Learning" (EURODL) or the "International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning" (iJET).

CAF 2009 Chair

Christian Gütl, Graz University of Technology, Austria

CAF 2009 Organization team

Alexander Nussbaumer, University of Graz, Austria
Mohammad Smadi, Graz University of Technology, Austria

CAF 2009 Program Committee (preliminary, to be extended)

• Dietrich Albert, University of Graz, Austria
• Vanessa Chang, Curtin University of Technology, Australia
• Peter Dolog, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Heinz Dreher, Curtin University of Technology, Australia
• Samir A. El-Seoud, Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Jordan
• Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
• Catherine P. Fulford, University of Hawaii,USA
• Michael Granitzer, Know-Center Graz, Austria
• Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer, University Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia
• Stephanie Linek, Universität Graz, Austria
• Bhaskar Mehta, Google, Switzerland
• Sven Meyer zu Eissen, Bayer Business Services, Germany
• Diane Salter, University of Hong Kong, China
• Sandra Schaffert, Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft, Austria
• Benno Stein, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany
• Daniela Tuparova, South Western University, Bulgarian
• Sandra HelenWilliams, Open University UK, UK
• SylviaWong, Aston University, UK

Further Information:

• Information about ICL 2009: http://www.icl-conference.org/
• Travel Information: http://www.icl-conference.org/accom.htm

Tourist Informaton: http://www.villach.at/inhalt/englisch/18271.htm

BPMS2 2009 (co-located with BPM) - EXTENSION of Paper Submission to JUNE 2

EXTENSION OF DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION TO JUNE 2, 2009!!

CALL FOR PAPERS

Second International Workshop on Business Process Management and Social Software (BPMS2)

in conjunction with BPM 2009

September 7th, 2009, Ulm, Germany

Papers submission deadline: June 2, 2009

http://crinfo.univ-paris1.fr/users/nurcan/BPMS2_2009/

Organizers:

Selmin Nurcan – University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France

Rainer Schmidt – University of Applied Sciences, Aalen, Germany

SCOPE:

Social software is a new paradigm that is spreading quickly in society, organizations and economics. It supports social interaction and social production. Social interaction is the interaction of non-predetermined individuals. Social production is the creation of artefacts, by combining the input from independent contributors without predetermining the way to do this. Users are supported in creating new contacts, presenting themselves and collaborating with other users. As a result, content, knowledge and software is not created by a hierarchy of experts, but by combining a multitude of contributions of independent authors/actors. Examples for such a social production are wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and tagging, etc.

Social software follows a more egalitarian and meritocratic approach compared to traditional approaches where the role of the software user is determined by the enterprise senior management and its representatives. Thus, trust and reputation play a crucial role in the use of social software instead of authority granted by the top management.

The paradigm of social software and social production has created a multitude of success stories such as wikipedia.org and the development of the Linux operating system. Therefore, more and more enterprises see social software and social production as a means for further improvement of their business processes and business models. For example, they integrate their customers into product development by using blogs to capture ideas for new products and features. Thus, business processes have to be adapted to new communication patterns between customers and the enterprise: for example, the communication with the customer is increasingly a bi-directional communication with the customer and among the customers. Social software also offers new possibilities to enhance business processes by improving the exchange of knowledge and information, to speed up decisions, etc.

Up to now, the interaction of social software and the underlying paradigm of social production with business processes have not been investigated in depth. Therefore, the objective of the workshop is to explore how social software and social production interact with business process management, how business process management has to change to comply with social production, and how business processes may profit from social techniques.

TOPICS OF INTEREST:

1. New opportunities provided by social software for BPM

- How can business processes fit to business models based on the paradigm of social production?

- Which new possibilities for the design of business processes are created by social software?

- How are trust and reputation established in business processes using social software?

- Are there business processes which require sociality, especially when they are not well defined

(as production workflows) but collaborative or ad hoc?

- How does social production influence the design of business processes?

- What is the impact on conceptual models for those categories of business processes which are not well-defined

or that we do not wish to freeze using classical business process enactment systems for instance?

2. Engineering next generation of business processes: BPM 2.0 ?

- Do we need new BPM methods and/or paradigms to cope with social software?

- Is there an influence of social production and social software on BPM methods themselves?

- Are there any similarities or relationships with process mining techniques and also with workflow control and role patterns?

- Which phases of the BPM lifecycle (Design, Deployment, Performance, and Evaluation) are affected the most by social software?

- How can BPM profit from using social software?

- Which types of social software can be used in which phases of the BPM lifecycle?

3. Business process implementation support by social software

- Which kinds of social software can be used to implement business processes?

- Which categories of business processes can profit from social software?

- How does social software interact with WFMS or other business process support systems?

- How can we use Wikis, Blogs etc. to support business processes?

- What new kinds of business knowledge representation are offered by social production?

SUBMISSION:

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers for presentation in any of the areas listed above. Only papers in English will be accepted. Length of full papers must not exceed 12 pages (There is no possibility to buy additional pages). Position papers and tool reports should be no longer than 6 pages.

Papers should be submitted in the new LNBIP format (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-487211-0). Papers have to present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere. The title page must contain a short abstract, a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above, and an indication of the submission category (regular paper/position paper/tool report).

Papers (preferably in PDF format) should be emailed to Rainer.Schmidt@htw-aalen.de.

The paper selection will be based upon the relevance of a paper to the main topics, as well as upon its quality and potential to generate relevant discussion. All the workshop papers will be published by Springer as a post-proceeding volume (to be sent around 4 months after the workshop) in their Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series.

EXPECTED RESULTS:

All papers will be published on workshop wiki before the workshop, so that everybody can learn about the problems that are important for other participants.

A blog will be used to encourage and support discussions.

The workshop will consist of long and short paper presentations, brainstorming sessions and discussions.

The workshop report will be created collaboratively using a wiki.

A special issue over all workshops will be published in a journal (decision in progress).

IMPORTANT DATES:

Paper submission: June 2, 2009

Author notification: June 16, 2009

Camera-ready: July 1, 2009

PROGRAM COMMITTEE :

Ilia Bider - IbisSoft, Sweden

Jan Bosch - Intuit, Mountain View, California, USA

Tad Hogg - HP Information Dynamics Laboratory, Palo Alto, USA

Ralf Klamma - Informatik 5, RWTH Aachen, Germany

Sai Peck Lee - University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Dragan Gasevic - School of Computing and Information Systems, Athabasca University, Canada

Werner Geyer - IBM T.J. Watson Research, Collaborative User Experience Group, Cambridge, USA

Gustaf Neumann - Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Vienna, Austria

Selmin Nurcan - University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, France

Anne Persson - School of Humanities and Informatics, University of Skövde, Sweden

Gil Regev - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Itecor, Switzerland

Michael Rosemann - Faculty of Information Technology Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Nick Russell - Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

Rainer Schmidt - University of Applied Sciences, Aalen, Germany

Miguel-Ángel Sicilia - University of Alcalá, Madrid, Spain

Pnina Soffer - Department Of Management Information Systems, University of Haifa, Israel

Workshop on E-Learning Security ELS-2009!

Workshop on E-Learning Security (ELS-2009)

in conjunction with

The 4th International Conference for Internet Technology and
Secured Transactions (ICITST-2009) Technical Co-Sponsored by
IEEE UK/RI Communication Section

November 9-12, 2009, London, UK (www.icitst.org)

Objectives
The aim of the ELS-2009 Workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in E-Learning Security and to discuss the latest advanced technologies in this area. This workshop is expected to stimulate discussions about the future development of appropriate models, methods, and tools for building E-Learning Security.

Topics of Interest include but are not limited to:
• Security and Privacy in E-Learning
• Security Issues on E-Learning Assessments
• E-Learning Security Auditing
• Biometrics in E-Learning
• Secure E-Learning Development and Application
• Digital Rights Management (DRM) for E-Learning
• Emerging E-Learning Markets

Important Dates
Paper Submission Deadline: June 30, 2009
Notification of Paper Acceptance/Rejection: July 31, 2009
Camera Ready Paper Due: September 1, 2009
Conference Dates: November 9-12, 2009

Paper Submission
The style file and templates is available at Paper Submission. Please submit your full paper(s) in PDF format via email to els-2009@icitst.org

For more details, visit www.icitst.org/Workshops.html

STEG'09: Deadline Extension To June 15, 2009

**** DEADLINE EXTENSION TO 15 JUNE 2009 ****


Second International Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Games (STEG'09)
http://www.prolearn-academy.org/Events/steg09

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Second Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Gaming (STEG'09) will be held in conjunction with the 8th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL'09, http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/), Aachen, Germany, August 19-21, 2009.

CONTEXT AND MOTIVATION
The Second Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Gaming (STEG'09) will be a continuative event to bring together international researchers from the story-telling and educational gaming research areas, based on the success of the First STEG Workshop (STEG'08). STEG'08 was held as a one-day event triggering fruitful discussions and reporting advanced research progress in this area. More information about STEG'08 can be found at http://www.prolearn-academy.org/Events/steg08. The paper winning the "best paper award" will be published in the International Journal on Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL). STEG'09 aims to reinforce the international community and to explore advanced research in this research domain..
Stories and story-telling are cultural achievements of significant relevance even in modern times. Nowadays, story-telling is being enhanced with the convergence of sociology, pedagogy, and technology. In recent years, computer gaming has also been deployed for educational purposes and has proved to be an effective approach to mental stimulation and intelligence development. Many conceptual similarities and some procedural correlation exist between story-telling and educational gaming. Therefore these two areas can be clubbed for research on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). Many facets of story-telling and educational gaming emulate real life processes, which can be represented either as complex story graphs or as interleaved sub-problems. This model is congruent with that used for Technology Enhanced Learning in vocational training. TEL in vocational training requires learning models that focus more on the process and less on the content.
The main difference between educational games and story-telling lies in the user’s motivational point of view. Story-telling aims at reliving real life tasks and capturing previous experiences in problem-solving for reuse, while educational games reproduce real life tasks in a virtual world in an (ideally) engaging and attractive process. Nevertheless, educational games require highly specialized technical and pedagogical skills and learning processes to cover the topics in sufficient depth and breadth. Imbalance between depth and breadth of study can lead to producing trivial games, which in turn can lead to de-motivating the learner.
While the integration of learning and gaming provides a great opportunity, several motivational challenges (particularly in vocational training) must also be addressed to ensure successful realization. Non-linear digital stories are an ideal starting point for the creation of educational games, since each story addresses a certain problem, so that the story recipient can gain benefit from other users’ experiences. This leads to the development of more realistic stories, which can provide the kernel for developing non-trivial educational videogames as a further step. These stories can cover the instructional portion of an educational game, while the game would add the motivation and engagement part.
In summary, this workshop aims at bringing together researchers, experts and practitioners from the domains of non-linear digital interactive story-telling and educational gaming to share ideas and knowledge. There is a great amount of separate research in these two fields and the celebration of this workshop will allow the participants to discover and leverage potential synergies.

Workshop topics
- Story-telling and game theories
- Story and game design paradigms for Web-based Learning
- Augmented story-telling and gaming
- Story-telling and educational gaming with social software
- Story-telling and educational gaming with mobile technologies
- Cross-media/transmedia story-telling and gaming
- Computer gaming for story-telling (Game design for narrative architectures)
- Multimedia story and game authoring
- Story-telling and educational gaming applications


SUBMISSIONS
Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as full papers (max. 10 pages) or work-in-progress as short papers (max. 5 pages). All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity and quality. Accepted papers will be published online in the ICWL workshop proceedings as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognized ISSN publication series, ISSN 1613-0073.

Authors should use the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/lncs). For camera-ready format instructions, please see "For Authors" instructions at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

To submit your paper please use STEG submission website:
https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=steg09

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission: June 15, 2009
Notification of acceptance: July 6, 2009
Camera Ready Submission: July 20, 2009
Workshop date: August 21, 2008

ORGANISERS
Yiwei Cao, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Stefan Göbel, TU Darmstadt, Germany
Anna Hannemann, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Cord Hockemeyer, University of Graz, Austria
Baltasar Fernández Manjón, Complutense University, Spain
Emmanuel Stefanakis, Harokopio University of Athen, Greece

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Anna Hannemann (RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany)
Baltasar Fernández Manjón (Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain)
Carsten Ullrich (Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China)
Christian Guetl (Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media (IICM), Graz University of Technology, Austria)
Cord Hockemeyer (University of Graz, Graz, Austria)
Emmanuel Stefanakis (Harokopio University of Athen, Athen, Greece)
Georg Thallinger (Joanneum Research, Graz, Austria)
Harald Kosch (University of Passau, Germany)
Jose Luis Sierra (Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain)
Manuel Fradinho (Cyntelix, Ireland)
Marc Spaniol (MPI, Saarbruecken, Germany)
Mathias Lux (Klagenfurt University, Austria)
Michael Granitzer (Know Center, Graz, Austria)
Michael Hausenblas (National University of Ireland Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland)
Michael D. Kickmeier-Rust (University of Graz, Graz, Austria)
Pablo Moreno-Ger (Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain)
Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany)
Romulus Grigoras (ENSEEIHT, France)
Ronan Champagnat (La Rochelle University, La Rachelle, France)
Stamatia Dasiopoulou (ITI Thessaloniki, Greece)
Stefan Göbel (TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany)
Stephan Lukosch (TU Delft, Delft, Netherlands)
Werner Bailer (Joanneum Research, Graz, Austria)
Wolfgang Gräther (Fraunhofer FIT, St. Augustin, Germany)
Yiwei Cao (RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany)
Zinayida Petrushyna (RWTH Aachen University)

PROLEARN Academy Newsletter 2009 - Week 21

*** News

Inaugural issue of Knowledge Management & E-Learning: An International Journal (KM&EL)
Posted on: May 25, 2009


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


*** New Call For Papers

eLEARNING Web 2.0-Brunel-UK
Call-Art: Conference, Paper submission deadline: May 31, 2009
eLEARNING Web 2.0 CONFERENCE Brunel University, West London, UK 6-7 July, 2009

ELS-2009: Call for Papers
Call-Art: Workshop, Paper submission deadline: Jun 30, 2009
Workshop on E-Learning Security (ELS-2009)

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



*** PROLEARN Academy - Measure

Our auto observation tool for scientific communities contains at present 1571 projects, of which 238 are newsfeeds, 95 newsletters, 515 web sites, 69 mailinglists and 654 blogs. The number of caught entries totals 133140 for the feeds, of which 4694 were retrieved last week. For the newsletters totals 3679 entries, of which 17 were retrieved last week, for the mailinglists there are 103978 entries, of which 462 last week and for the blogs there are 232267 entries, of which 658 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 3 new projects. These are the following:

2 Web Pages

RHEN - Studentships information

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

Ple - CETISwiki
PLE
Category: Social Sciences, Economy, Law, State, Education; in English


1 Mailinglists

dldc : DLDC(Distance Learning and Developing Countries)
This is a discussion list for researchers, teachers and students interested in distance learning or distance education (DE) in developing countries. The site is intended for anyone who is teaching, learning or researching in distance education in developing countries. It seeks to show how new ICTs can be used for teaching and learning at a distance, especially e-learning, open educational resources, open source, Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, social networking, social bookmarking and other social software. It is connected to the website http://members.tripod.com/stewart_marshall/
Category: N.A.; in English

IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM2009)

CALL FOR PAPERS

IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM2009)
Hyatt Regency Mission Bay Spa and Marina
San Diego, California, USA
December 14-16, 2009

http://ism2009.eecs.uci.edu

Sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society

The IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM2009) is an international forum for researchers to exchange information regarding advances in the state of the art and practice of multimedia computing, as well as to identify the emerging research topics and define the future of multimedia computing. The technical program of ISM2009 will consist of invited talks, paper presentations, and panel discussions. Submissions of high quality papers describing mature results or on-going work are invited. Topics for submission include but are not limited to:

* Multimedia systems, architecture, and applications
* Multimedia networking and QoS
* Peer-to-peer multimedia systems and streaming
* Pervasive and interactive multimedia systems including mobile systems, pervasive gaming, and digital TV
* Multimedia meta-modeling techniques and operating systems
* Architecture specification languages
* Software development using multimedia techniques
* Multimedia signal processing including audio, video, image processing, and coding
* Visualization
* Virtual Reality
* Multimedia file systems, databases, and retrieval
* Multimedia collaboration
* Rich media enabled E-commerce
* Computational intelligence including neural networks, fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms
* Intelligent agents for multimedia content creation, distribution, and analysis
* Internet telephony and hypermedia technologies and systems
* Multimedia security including digital watermark and encryption
* Mobile Multimedia Systems and Services
* Multimodal Interaction, including Human Factors
* Multimodal User Interfaces: Design, Engineering, Modality-Abstractions, etc.
* Multimedia tools including authoring, analyzing, editing, and browsing

There will be a Best Paper Award and a Best Student Paper Award competition. The award winners will be announced at the conference banquet.

===========
SUBMISSIONS
===========
The written and spoken language of ISM2009 is English. Authors should submit an 8-page technical paper manuscript in double-column IEEE format including authors' names and
affiliations, and a short abstract electronically, following the submission guidelines available on the ISM2009 web page. Only electronic submission will be accepted. All papers should be in Adobe portable document format (PDF). The Conference Proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press and be available for online access via IEEEXplore. A number of the papers presented at the conference will be selected for possible publications in journals.

ISM2009 will include a few workshops dedicated to focused interest areas. Submissions of proposals on workshops of emerging areas are invited. Papers from Workshops will be
presented at ISM2009, and included in the Proceedings. Submissions of proposals on panels and demonstrations are also encouraged. Panel summary articles may also be included in the conference proceedings.

Prospective authors are also invited to submit papers to the Industry Program, which will be included in the proceedings. A main goal of this program is to present research work that exposes the academic and research communities to challenges and issues important for the industry. Please refer to the Industry Program link for submission details.

===============
IMPORTANT DATES
===============

April 20, 2009 Submission of workshop proposals due
May 1, 2009 Notification of acceptance of workshop proposals
June 10, 2009 Submission of main conference papers due
June 10, 2009 Submission of proposals on panels due
June 10, 2009 Submission of industry program papers due
August 10, 2009 Submission of demonstration proposals due
August 20, 2009 Notification of acceptance of main conference
papers
August 20, 2009 Notification of acceptance of demonstration
proposals
August 20, 2009 Notification of acceptance of industry program
papers
TBA Camera-Ready copy of accepted papers due

IEEE Intelligent Systems Special Issue on Mobile Information Retrieval

CALL FOR PAPERS

IEEE Intelligent Systems
Special Issue on Mobile Information Retrieval

Submissions due for review: 13 July 2009

Mobile information retrieval (mobile IR) is concerned with the indexing and retrieval of information such as text, graphics, animation, sound, speech, image, and video, and their possible combinations for use in mobile devices with wireless network connectivity.

The proliferation of wireless and mobile devices such as personal digital assistants and mobile phones has created a large demand for mobile information content as well as effective mobile IR techniques. New technologies are needed for representing, modeling, indexing, and retrieving
mobile data.

This special issue will focus on contributions that expand the state of the art of building intelligent systems for mobile IR. To be considered for this special issue, submissions related to information retrieval on the mobile Web and mobile Internet must address issues specific to mobile IR. We thus solicit original papers on research that

. effectively indexes and retrieves mobile information,
. can be integrated into unified mobile browsing and retrieval systems, and
. gives new insight into scalable algorithms allowing access to very large mobile databases.

We are especially interested in papers that address
. automatic summarization and personalization in mobile information;
. content adaptation for small display devices;
. content-based extraction, indexing, annotation, and retrieval of mobile data;
. context-aware information processing;
. data mining of query logs, clicks, and Web traffic on mobile devices;
. efficient retrieval models and query processing of mobile information from distributed databases;
. extraction of useful semantics in mobile information for indexing and retrieval;
. knowledge discovery through content and keyword fusion in mobile summarization, indexing, and retrieval;
. location-based search for mobile devices;
. mobile learning and user profiling for mobile information retrieval;
. mobile peer tagging and knowledge propagation;
. mobile retrieval across multiple media types, network conditions, and user preferences;
. multimodal user interface technologies;
. scalable browsing algorithms for large mobile databases; and
. spatial data management, mining spatial data generated by mobile users.

Submissions due for review: 13 July 2009

Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be 3,500 to 7,500 words (counting a standard figure or table as 200 words) and should follow the magazine's style and presentation guidelines (see www.computer.org/portal/pages/intelligent/mc/author.html). References should be limited to 10 citations. To submit a manuscript, access the IEEE Computer Society Web-based system, Manuscript Central, at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee.

Questions?

Contact Guest Editors Flora Tsai, fst1@columbia.edu; Minoru Etoh,
etoh@ieee.org; Xing Xie, xing.xie@microsoft.com; Wang-Chien Lee,
wlee@cse.psu.edu; or Qiang Yang, qyang@cse.ust.hk.

1st International Workshop on Internet Multimedia Mining, in conjunction with IEEE ICDM 2009

CALL FOR PAPERS
1st International Workshop on:

*INTERNET MULTIMEDIA MINING*
(with dataset support)
http://research.microsoft.com/~xshua/imm2009

In conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Data Mining 2009
December 6, Miami, Florida, USA

*Aims and scope*

With the explosion of video and image data available on the Internet, online multimedia applications become more and more important. Moreover, mining semantics and other useful information from large-scale Internet multimedia data to facilitate online and local multimedia content analysis, search and other related applications has also gained more and more attention from both academia and industry. On the one hand, the rapid increase of online multimedia data brings new challenges to multimedia content analysis, multimedia retrieval and related multimedia applications, especially in scalability. Both computation cost and performance of many existing techniques are far from satisfactory. On the other hand, Internet also provides us with new opportunities to attack these challenges as well as conventional problems encountered in multimedia mining, content analysis, image/video understanding and computer vision. That is, the massive associated metadata, context and social information available on the Internet, as well as the massive grassroots Internet users, are invaluable resources that can be leveraged to solve the aforementioned difficulties.

Recently more and more researchers are realizing both the challenges and the opportunities for multimedia research brought by the Internet. This workshop aims at bringing together high-quality and novel research works on "Internet Multimedia Mining".

One of the major obstacles of "Internet Multimedia Mining" research is the difficulty in forming a "good" dataset for algorithm developing, system prototyping and performance evaluation. Together with this workshop, we release a benchmark dataset, which is based on real Internet multimedia data and real Internet multimedia search engines. Submissions to this workshop
are encouraged to use this dataset, but papers/demos working on other Internet-based datasets are also welcome.

*MSRA Multimedia Dataset*

MSRA-MM Version 1 dataset is ready for shipping. Detailed information about the dataset can be found at: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=79942. Please
contact the dataset chair (Meng Wang: mengwang@microsoft.com) to request the data.

MSRA-MM Version 2 dataset (10 times larger with more metadata) will be ready
around June 15. Please submit your request to the dataset chair.

*Topics of Interest*

Topics of interest for this workshop include, but are not limited to:

* Internet video/image/audio annotation, classification, tagging, search ranking and reranking by combining textual description and video/image content.
* General video/image/audio annotation, classification, tagging, search ranking and reranking by exploiting Internet data and/or users. Approaches which can handle large-scale data/users are more preferred.
* Video/image/audio processing and analyses using Internet data as a knowledge base.
* Social media processing, such as online media authoring and sharing, tag recommendation, tag filtering, tag ranking, and search ranking based on image/video/audio social context.
* Knowledge mining from Internet multimedia data, such as mining semantic distance of keywords or images, mining video/image/audio copy relationships (e.g., given a video/image/audio, to find all videos/images on the Internet that have the same content with the video/image, either entirely or partially), mining trends of multimedia consuming/sharing,
mining knowledge (for example, "photo encyclopedia"", from massive amount of multimedia content on the Internet, etc.
* Web-scale content-based multimedia retrieval (for example, approaches based on large-scale high-dimensional feature indexing).
* Other online multimedia mining applications, such as multimedia advertising, multimedia recommendation, as well as location/GPS/geography-enabled multimedia, multimedia sensor network over the Internet, etc.

*Paper Submission*

We accept two forms of submissions: regular full papers and demonstrations. Regular submissions for this workshop are required to use the same format as regular ICDM long papers (a maximum of 10 pages in the IEEE 2-column format). And demonstration submission requires a 1- or 2-page demo description. We especially encourage long-paper authors to submit a demo
also. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by at least 3 members of the program committee. Extended version of selected papers will be invited to submit to a special issue of a top journal in data mining or multimedia area. Paper submission site: https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/imm2009/

*Awards*

The workshop will present two awards: a best paper award and a best demonstration award, judged by a separate awards committee.

*Important Dates*
* August 8: Submission of full paper
* August 29: Submission of demo paper
* September 8: Notification of Acceptance
* September 28: Camera-Ready Paper Due
* December 6: Workshop

-------------------------
*Organizing Committee*
-------------------------
Workshop Co-Chairs
* Xian-Sheng Hua, Microsoft Research Asia, China
* Cees G.M. Snoek, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
* Zhi-Hua Zhou, Nanjing University, China

Dataset Chair
* Meng Wang, Microsoft Research Asia, China


-----------------------------
Best regards,

Xian-Sheng, Zhi-Hua and Cees.

SADM 2009, In conjunction with IEEE ICDM 2009

CFP - Second International Workshop on Semantic Aspects
in Data Mining (SADM 2009)

http://sadm09.isti.cnr.it/PC.html

In conjunction with the 2009 IEEE International Conference on
Data Mining (ICDM 2009), Miami, December 6 2009
http://www.cs.umbc.edu/ICDM09

Knowledge Discovery is in general described as a process of automatic extraction of new knowledge from data. However, the characteristics of the data, their semantics, the knowledge that already exists about the data, and the context of the application has rarely been considered in the discovery process. Semantic and reasoning aspects may intervene in several steps of knowledge discovery, but how these aspects interact within the process, and the forms that this can take, is an issue that has been given little attention so far.

In data pre-processing, semantic aspects may help in (1) identifying source data of interest, (2) enriching the data with additional domain information, and (3) generating more meaningful and human understandable patterns, once the generated patterns are directly related to the input data. During the mining task, semantics may be used as constraints, thus allowing (1) search space reduction, (2) pattern pruning, and (3) the development of more efficient algorithms. Semantics may intervene in the post-processing step, when helping in the explanation of large amounts of patterns, typically difficult to interpret.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on all context, semantic and reasoning aspects in Data Mining, developing techniques to embed semantics in the knowledge discovery process, and taking into account ontological and reasoning issues.

Important Dates:

- Submission Deadline: 17 July 2009
- Notication acceptance: 8 September 2009
- Camera-ready: 28 September 2009
- Workshop day 6 December 2009

Best Paper Award

The Workshop organizers will select the best paper of the workshop. The selected Best Paper will be recommended for publication in a special issue of the International Journal of Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS), edited by Springer.

Topics of Interest:

The workshop will seek submissions where semantic information plays an explicit role in the knowledge discovery process. The intent of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in semantic aspects in data mining from a wide range of possible data mining subareas, including: web mining, medical data mining, spatio-temporal data mining,
ubiquitous knowledge discovery, and privacy-preserving data mining.

The aim of the workshop is to receive contributions in the following topics, which are not exclusive:

- Techniques to embed semantics into the discovery process
- Semantics in data pre-processing and post-processing
- Semantic-based pruning
- Knowledge-based data mining algorithms
- Semantic-based techniques for feature selection
- Ontologies and data pre-processing
- Ontology-based evaluation of discovered patterns
- Data Mining Query Languages
- Constraint-based data mining
- Semantics for Knowledge representation, interpretation, and reasoning
- Semantics in spatial and spatio-temporal data mining
- Conceptual modeling and data mining
- Semantic-based KDD processes and frameworks
- Techniques using semantics for domain-driven data mining
- Semantics in ubiquitous data mining
- Semantics in biological data mining
- Semantics for uncertainty handling in data mining
- Semantics in Privacy-Preserving Data Mining
- Semantics in Social Network Data Mining

Organization:

Chairs:

Dr. Vania Bogorny,
Instituto de Informatica,
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul,
E-mail: vbogorny@inf.ufrgs.br

Dr. Hui Xiong,
Management Science and Information Systems Department,
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey,
Email: hxiong@rutgers.edu

Dr. Chiara Renso,
Instituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione "Alessandro Faedo"
KDD Laboratory, ISTI-CNR Pisa, Italy, CNR di Pisa
Via G. Moruzzi 156124 PISA -Italy
Email: chiara.renso@isti.cnr.it

Program Committee (to be completed):

1. Luis Otavio Alvares, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
2. Ronnie Alves, Institute of Developmental Biology and Cancer, Faculte des
Sciences, France
3. Miriam Baglioni, Department of Computer Science, University of Pisa, Italy
4. Jean-Francois Boulicaut, INSA, University of Lyon, France
5. Toon Calders, Eindhoven Technical University, The Netherlands
6. Ivan Janciak, University of Wien, Austria
7. Jose Antonio Fernandes de Macedo, EPFL, Switzerland
8. Vipin Kumar, University of Minnesota, USA
9. Donato Malerba, University of Bari, Italy
10. Stanley Oliveira, Embrapa Informatica -Sao Paulo, Brazil
11. Giuseppe Psaila, University of Bergamo, Italy
12. Solange Rezende, Universidade Federal de So Carlos, Brazil
13. Yannis Theodoridis, University of Pireus, Greece
14. Monica Wachowicz, UPM, Madrid, Spain
15. Mohammed Zaki, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA

Submission Guidelines and Review Process:

High quality research papers in the relevant areas are invited. Original papers exploring new directions will receive especially careful consideration. Papers that have already been accepted or are currently under review for other conferences or journals will not be considered.

All accepted workshop papers will be included in the IEEE ICDM Workshop Proceedings, to be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press. Therefore, at least one author of the accepted paper must register to attend the workshop. Paper submissions should be limited to a maximum of 8 pages in PDF format, in the IEEE 2-column style (see the IEEE Computer Society Press Proceedings Author Guidelines at http://www.computer.org/portal/pages/cscps/cps/nal/icdm06.xml).

All papers will be reviewed by the Program Committee on the basis of technical quality, relevance to workshop topics, originality, significance, and clarity. We will follow the double blind review process. Authors must hence not use identifying information in the text of the paper and
bibliographies must be referenced to preserve anonymity. Please use the Submission Form on the ICDM'09 website to submit your paper.

ACM CIKM-2009 Workshop on Complex Networks in Information & Knowledge Management (CNIKM'09)

CNIKM'09: Call For Papers

The 1st International Workshop on
Complex Networks in Information & Knowledge Management (CNIKM)
at ACM CIKM-2009

Hong Kong, November 6, 2009

http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~dell/cnikm09/

Overview

We are in a connected age: real-world entities often interconnect with each other through explicit or implicit relationships to form a complex network, such as information networks, social networks, economic networks, technological networks, and biological networks. They exhibit interesting statistical characteristics such as small-world and scale-free. The past decade has witnessed an explosive growth of research on various complex networks. How can we analyse, manage and mine information in large-scale complex networks effectively and efficiently? This gives researchers in database, information retrieval and knowledge management great challenges as well as opportunities. In line with CIKM's tradition of promoting interdisciplinary research, this workshop aims to have a major impact on future research by bringing together researchers across both computer science and the emerging scientific discipline of network science to foster
discussion and exchange ideas.

Topics

The complex networks of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Information Networks (incl. Networks of Queries and Documents)
- Social Networks (incl. Networks of Social Media)
- Economic Networks
- Technological Networks
- Biological Networks

The research problems of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Structure and Dynamics of Complex Networks
- Formation and Generation of Complex Networks
- Community Detection in Complex Networks
- Motif Discovery in Complex Networks
- Link Prediction in Complex Networks
- Communication and Contagion on Complex Networks
- Indexing and Ranking in Complex Networks
- Decentralised Search in Complex Networks
- Clustering and Classification in Complex Networks
- Semi-Supervised Learning and Active Learning on Complex Networks
- Visualization and Summarization of Complex Networks

Both theoretical and practical research papers are welcome, particularly
those addressing computational or algorithmic issues.

Important Dates

- Paper submission due: July 1, 2009
- Notification of acceptance: August 1, 2009
- Camera-ready version due: August 15, 2009
- Workshop date: November 6, 2009

Submission

All submissions should be in ACM conference style and PDF format. http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html Full papers may not exceed 8 pages; short papers may not exceed 4 pages. No extra pages can be purchased. All submissions must be original and
unpublished before. The review process will be double-blind: authors should conceal their identity in their submissions.

All submissions should be made through EasyChair.
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cnikm09

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by PC members. The organisers will examine the reviews and make final paper selections for the workshop.

Registration

At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the workshop. Registration must be done at the time when the author sends the camera-ready copy of the accepted paper to the workshop chair. Workshop registration fee is determined by CIKM.

Publication

The workshop proceedings will be printed on CD together with the main CIKM-2009 conference proceedings by ACM.

An edited book on this topic has been proposed by the organisers in Wiley's Web Data Mining Series. Extended versions of selected papers are expected to be published in that book.
http://www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~mark/wiley_web_mining_leaflet.pdf

A blog has been created to facilitate informal discussion online before and after the workshop.
http://cnikm09.blogspot.com/

A short workshop report will be written by the organisers for a professional newsletter (e.g., SIGIR Forum and BCS-IRSG Informer).

Workshop Programme

It is anticipated to be a full-day workshop with two keynote addresses (TBA) and two refereed research paper sessions. The detailed programme will be released once it is finalised.

(Tentative) Program Committee

- Karsten Borgwardt, MPIs Tubingen, Germany
- Guanrong Chen, City University of Hong Kong, China
- Xueqi Cheng, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
- Aaron Clauset, Santa Fe Institute, USA
- Vittoria Colizza, ISI Foundation, Italy
- Nick Craswell, Microsoft Research, USA
- Anirban Dasgupta, Yahoo! Research, USA
- Brian Davison, Lehigh University, USA
- Arjen de Vries, CWI, Netherlands
- Tina Eliassi-Rad, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA
- Trevor Fenner, University of London, UK
- Abraham Flaxman, UW Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, USA
- Brian Gallagher, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA
- Lise Getoor, University of Maryland, USA
- Jake Hofman, Yahoo! Research, USA
- Hawoong Jeong, KAIST, Korea
- Irwin King, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
- Kevin Lang, Yahoo! Research, USA
- Jan Larsen, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
- Jure Leskovec, Stanford University, USA
- Michael Mahoney, Stanford University, USA
- Stephane Marchand-Maillet, University of Geneva, Switzerland
- Mark Levene, University of London, UK
- Xiaoli Li, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
- Tsuyoshi Murata, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
- See-Kiong Ng, Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore
- Wilfred Ng, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
- Jian-Yun Nie, University of Montreal, Canada
- Marcel Reinders, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
- Dawei Song, The Robert Gordon University, UK
- Hanghang Tong, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
- Bing-Hong Wang, University of Science and Technology of China, China

Organizers

- Jun Wang, University College London, UK
- Shi Zhou, University College London, UK
- Dell Zhang, Birkbeck, University of London, UK

CIKM09 Workshop on Cloud Data Management

First International Workshop on Cloud Data Management

CloudDB2009 Call for Papers

In conjunction with the ACM 18^th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

November 6, 2009, Hong Kong, China

http://www.clouddb.org/

Technology advances in communications, computation, and storage result in huge collections of data, capturing information of value to business, science, government, and society. Data volumes are currently growing faster than Moore¡¯s law. Looking forward, the exponential growth is not likely to stop. The huge size of data is imposing big challenges on infrastructure for data storage which can achieve economical scaling to even more than Petabyte, massively parallel query execution, and facilities for analytical processing. Meanwhile, the rise of large data centers and cluster computers has created a new business model, cloud-based computing, where businesses and individuals can rent storage and computing capacity, rather than making the large capital investments needed to construct and provision large-scale computer installations. Cloud-based data storage and management is a rapidly expanding business. Whilst these emerging services have reduced the cost of data storage and delivery by several orders of magnitude, there is significant complexity involved in ensuring large data service can scale when needed to ensure consistent and reliable operation under peak loads. Cloud-based environment has the technical requirement to manage data center virtualization, lowers cost and boosts reliability by consolidating systems on the cloud. In addition, in an ideal world, the cloud systems should be geographically dispersed to reduce their vulnerability due to earthquakes and other catastrophes, which increase technical challenge on a great level of distributed data interoperability and mobility.

This is the first workshop in CIKM conference that addresses the challenge of large data management based on cloud computing infrastructure. This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners in cloud computing and data-intensive system design, programming, parallel algorithms, data management, scientific applications, and information-based applications to maximize performance, minimize cost and improve the scale of their endeavors.

This workshop welcomes papers that address fundamental research issues in this challenging area, with emphasis on personal and social applications of cloud-based data management. We also encourage papers to report on system level research related to cloud computing and data-intensive computing. A number of invited papers will also be solicited.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to

•cloud computing infrastructure for big data storage and computing;

•cloud-based big data system, including architecture, scalability, economy, consistence-availability-partition (CAP), and security;

•services and data discovery and content and service distribution in cloud computing infrastructures;

•cross-platform interoperability;

•security and risk in the cloud/Security and risk in the big data management

•service-level agreements, business models, and pricing policies;

•novel data-intensive computing applications

•language for massively parallel query execution

•data intensive scalable computing

•content distribution systems for big data

•data management within and across data centers

•large scale analytical methodology and algorithm

Submission Papers

Manuscripts should be formatted using the ACM camera-ready templates (both for MS word and Latex) available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. There are two styles on the website. Both the Strict Adherence to SIGS and the Tighter Alternate style are allowed. Papers cannot exceed 8 pages in length. Please submit papers to clouddb09@gmail.com. Selected papers will be included in JCST Special Issue on Trends Changing Data Management. Some selected papers will be encouraged for submission to TKDE special issue on 'cloud computing' for consideration of publication; the papers will have to meet TKDE publication requirements and will go through the normal reviewing process.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: July 5th 2009

Notification date: Aug 11st 2009

Camera-ready submission deadline: Aug 20th 2009

Organizing Committee

Workshop Co-Chairs:

Prof. Xiaofeng Meng, Renmin University of China, China

Dr. Haixun Wang, IBM T. J. Watson Research, USA

Dr. Ying Chen, IBM China Research Lab, China

Local Arrangement Co-Chairs:

Dr. Jiaheng Lu, Renmin University of China, China

Dr. Jie Qiu, IBM China Research Lab, China

PC members:

• Lei Chen, HKUST, Hong Kong

• Jidong Chen, EMC Research China, China

• Brian Frank Cooper, Yahoo! Research, U.S.A

• Hai Jin, Huazhong Univ. of Sci. and Tech., China

• Masaru Kitsuregawa, Tokyo University, Japan

• Avinash Lakshman, Facebook, U.S.A

• Chen Li, UCI, U.S.A

• Xiaoming Li, Peking University, China

• Ying Li, IBM Research, China

• Zhanhuai Li, Northwestern Polytechnic Univ., China

• Xuemin Lin, Univ. of New South Wales, Australia

• David Lomet, Microsoft, U.S.A

• Zaiqing Nie, Microsoft Research Asia, China

• Jian Pei, Simon Fraser University, Canada

• Adam Silberstein, Yahoo! Research, U.S.A

• Kian-Lee Tan, NUS, Singapore

• Changjie Tang, Sichuan University, China

• Chunqiang Tang, IBM T. J. Watson Research, U.S.A

• Yufei Tao, CUHK, Hong Kong

• Shivakumar Vaithyanathan, IBM Research, U.S.A

• Kyu-Young Whang, KAIST, Korea

• Guoren Wang, Northeastern University, China

• Ji-Rong Wen, Microsoft Research Asia, China

• Jianliang Xu, HKBU, Hong Kong

• Jiangming Yang, Microsoft Research Asia, China

• Jun Yang, Duke University, U.S.A

• Sai Zeng, IBM T. J. Watson Research, U.S.A

• Rui Zhang, University of Melbourne, Australia

• Aoying Zhou, Fudan University, China

• Lizhu Zhou, Tsinghua University, China

• Xiaodong Zhou, AOL China Lab, China