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

Call for Participation

ICWL 2009
International Conference on Web-based Learning
August 19-21, 2009
Aachen, Germany
http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/

Early bird registration deadline: July 17, 2009
http://www.hkws.org/events/icwl2009/registration.html

ICWL is an annual international conference on web-based learning. Since the first ICWL was held in Hong Kong in 2002, it has been held in Australia (2003), China (2004), Hong Kong (2005), Malaysia (2006), United Kingdom (2007), and China (2008). The 8th ICWL 2009 will be held in Aachen, Germany, a city with rich culture, high-tech research, and a truly European spirit. ICWL 2009 will be jointly organized by RWTH Aachen University, Hong Kong Web Society, and Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science. The technical program features keynote addresses, plenary presentations of invited papers, parallel sessions for papers and four compelling workshops. Over 200 researchers and practitioners from the web-based learning community are expected to assemble in the beautiful city of Aachen. Fruitful discussions, additional EU project
meetings and an exciting social program are waiting for them.

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

Keynote talks:
• "Learning in Times of Abundance: The Snowflake Effect" by Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
• "Exploiting User Generated Content to Improve Search" by Wolfgang Nejdl, University of Hannover, Germany

Invited papers:
• "Debating the wisdom of personalisation" by Helen Ashman, UniSA, Australia
• "On Social e-Learning" by Won Kim, Sungkyunkwan University, Korea
• "Web-based Learning – Yes we can!" by Ulrik Schroeder, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

Social Events:
• Welcome reception with live Jazz music, August 19, 2009
• Grand Banquette in the old spa house of Aachen, August 20, 2009
• Guided tour to historical Aachen, August 21, 2009

Workshops:
• STEG'09: Second Workshop on Story-Telling and Educational Games
• ViWo'09: Workshop on Virtual Worlds for academic, organizational, and life-long learning
• SIRTEL'09: Social Informational Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning
• JEM'09: Joining Educational Mathematics – Final Workshop

Conference organization:

General Chair
Matthias Jarke, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

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

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

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

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

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

Treasurers
Howard Leung, Hong Kong Web Society, Hong Kong
Zinayida Petrushyna, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

We look forward to welcoming you to Aachen in August 2009!

Deadline extension: PhD fellowship position in Social Software and Semantic Web at DERI, NUI Galway

** Deadline extended until the end of the week **

The Unit Social Software (USS) at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute

DERI: http://www.deri.ie/ - of the National University of Ireland, Galway
invites applications for a 4 years fully-funded PhD fellowship position.

DERI is a leading research institute in semantic technologies that offers a stimulating, dynamic and multi-cultural research environment, excellent ties to research-groups worldwide and standardization bodies, close collaboration with industrial partners and up-to-date infrastructure and resources.

The DERI Unit Social Software focuses on the convergence of Social Software and the Semantic Web by developing models and tools that support and take advantage of these two trends. Achievements of DERI USS include SIOC -Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities - and a large number of publications and tutorials on the topic in international venues and journals.
USS Research is performed in collaboration with other DERI units and industrial partners. The PhD position is funded by Science Foundation Ireland (http://sfi.ie) within the Lion2 project and offers for the successful candidate an annual stipend, course fees and conference travel when
presenting.

Applicants should have a strong interest in Social Software, Semantic Web and Web Science in general and hold an excellent primary degree or Masters qualification in a relevant discipline (e.g. computer science, information science, knowledge representation), with an emphasis on practical aspects of research (e.g. industrial project experience, ontology development and
open-source software developement being distinct advantages). Selected candidates are expected to have the willingness to combine formal scientific work with application-oriented research and development in projects funded by national and international (EU) funding agencies, as well as participating in open-source projects and standardization activities.

Please submit your application (including cover letter, relevant publications or software implementation, full CV and contact details for two referees) to hr.ie@deri.org by 5pm on Friday, July 3rd with the subject line 'PhD Position - DERI USS'. Candidates will be contacted in the first week of July and interviews will be then conducted for successful applications. For further information please contact Alexandre Passant (alexandre.passant@deri.org) and John Breslin (john.breslin@deri.org).

IEEE ISM'09: Workshop on Data Semantics for Multimedia Systems and Applications

The 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Data Semantics for Multimedia Systems
and Applications (DSMSA2009)

http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~yucao/Service/DSMSA2009.htm

held in conjunction with
The IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM2009)
December 14-16, 2009
San Diego, California, USA
http://ism2009.eecs.uci.edu/

Outstanding papers will be invited for extension and publication in a special issue of Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP) published by Springer

In the last decades, substantial progress has been made in content analysis, multimedia streaming, and human-centered computing to facilitate the development of large-scale multimedia systems. Together with the recent progress on semantic web, scalable machine learning, and multi-modal interaction, it is now possible to build a new generation multimedia
applications that enable large-scale semantic representation, analysis, and delivery of multimedia data from heterogeneous data sources. However, there is still a long way to go for mature solutions of multimedia database systems that are capable of processing semantics-rich, large-volume multimedia data. It could be even more challenging if such systems are under stringent functional and non-functional (e.g., QoS) requirements.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in multimedia semantic computing and provide a forum for multidisciplinary research opportunities, with a focus on how to apply the semantic technologies to the acquisition, generation, transmission, storage, processing, and retrieval of large-scale multimedia information. Discussions on future challenges in multimedia information manipulation, as well as practical solutions for the design and implementation of multimedia database software systems are also encouraged.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to practical areas that span a variety of aspects of multimedia semantic computing including

* Automatic generation of multimedia presentations
* Semantic multimedia metadata extraction
* Annotation tools and methods for multimedia semantics
* Media ontology generation/learning/reasoning
* Content-based multimedia analysis
* Social media computing
* Web-scale multimedia mining and retrieval
* Multimedia indexing, searching, and retrieving
* Multimedia streaming
* Multimedia data visualization
* Semantic-based QoS control and scheduling
* Semantic-based Internet data streaming and delivery
* Multimedia standards (e.g., MPEG-7 and XMP) and Semantic Web
* Semantics enabled multimedia applications (including annotation, browsing, storage, retrieval, and visualization)
* Semantics enabled networking and middleware for multimedia applications
* Service Infrastructure, technology, and tools for Multimedia software systems

Paper Submission and Publication

Papers must be original and not submitted to or accepted by any other conference or journal. An electronic version (PDF format) of the full paper should be submitted by the paper submission deadline to the workshop website (http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~yucao/Service/DSMSA2009.htm). All submissions will be acknowledged. Submitted manuscripts should not exceed six (6) pages in IEEE two-column format, including figures, tables, and references. Each
paper will be peer reviewed by at least two experts in the topical area. All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and will be indexed by EI. Outstanding papers will be invited for extension and publication in a special issue of Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP) (Springer) and will be indexed by both SCI and EI.

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: July 15, 2009
Notification of acceptance: August 31, 2009
Camera-ready copy and author registration: September 25, 2009

Workshop Organizer
(Any general questions regarding the DSMSA workshop should be directed to
dsmsa2009@easychair.org)

General Chair
Balakrishnan Prabhakaran, University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Workshop Co-Chairs
Yu Cao, California State University at Fresno, USA
Jun Gao, Hefei University of Technology, P.R.China
Raphaël Troncy, Institut Eurécom (EURECOM), France

ACCV 2009 Workshop on Representation and Modeling of Large-scale 3D Environments (Modeling-3D) - Deadline extended

DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL JULY 20th

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2009 International Workshop on
Representation and Modeling of Large-scale 3D Environments (Modeling-3D)
(In conjunction with ACCV'2009)
Xian, China, September 24, 2009

http://graphics.usc.edu/~suyay/modeling3D2009.htm

Important Dates
- Paper submission due: July 20, 2009 (updated)
- Notification of acceptance: August 10, 2009
- Camera-ready paper due: August 15, 2009
- Workshop: September 24, 2009


Recent advances in sensor and modeling technologies enable the development of novel techniques that offer both feasibility and robust performance on reconstruction of large-scale environments. Improvements on the performance of traditional/novel vision techniques such as structure from motion, multi-view stereo, and image-based modeling have made high-end acquisition of 3D structure and motion a reality. Advances in sensor technologies such as depth camera, closer-range laser range finder, and Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) permit to deploy modeling systems on terrestrial, airborne, static, moving, and even handheld platforms to quickly capture 3D structure of a large environment with high degree of accuracy. Progresses in computer graphics enable effective representation, rendering and visualization of photorealistic
models on PCs. The advances in high-speed network allow effective delivery of 3D models throughout the networked world.

As part of the ACCV 2009, the Modeling-3D 2009 Workshop will bring together researchers to present results and innovations in all aspects of modeling and representation of large-scale 3D environments. The workshop seeks original high-quality research and application submissions. All submitted papers will be subject to a peer review process. Accepted papers will be published
together with the proceedings of ACCV 2009 in electronic format by Springer. High-quality papers will be selected to appear in a special issue of the International Journal of Virtual Reality (IJVR) after the conference.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

- Scene reconstruction from multi-dimensional and multi-view images
- Wide-area structure from motion and stereo
- 3D scene modeling from multiple sensors
- Real-time scene modeling from video
- Range data analysis and processing
- 3D shape and feature representation
- Multi-sensor data fusion, alignment, and registration
- 3D model simplification and compression
- Stream processing for very large datasets
- Appearance/illumination modeling and representation
- Real-time, mobile 3D systems
- Rending and visualization of large-scale models
- Applications of large-scale models and modeling systems

Important Dates
- Paper submission due: July 20, 2009
- Notification of acceptance: August 10, 2009
- Camera-ready paper due: August 15, 2009
- Workshop: September 24, 2009

Paper Submission Guidelines
Format: papers submitted for review and publication must follow the format specified for the main ACCV 2009 conference: author guidelines for paper submission to ACCV2009. The maximum paper length for review as well as for publication is 8 pages.

Submission: paper must be submitted electronically in Adobe Acrobat PDF format at the Submission Website.

Review: the review process is double-blind, so the paper must not include any information which allows the authors to be identified. This means that authors should not indicate their names or affiliations on the paper, acknowledgements must not be included in the manuscript, and references to authors' previous work must only be included in a form that does not link them to the authors.

Organizers
----------
Suya You, University of Southern California, USA
Jonathan Wu, University of Windsor, Canada
Wanquan Liu, Curtin University of Technology, Australia
Richard Xu, Charles Sturt University, Australia

Program Committee
-----------------
Adrien Bartoli, CNRS, France
Anup Basu, Univ. of Alberta, Canada
Kostas Daniilidis Univ. of Pennsylvania, USA
Robert Fisher, University of Edinburgh, UK
Patrick Flynn, University of Notre Dame, USA
Jan-Michael Frahm, UNC Chapel Hill, USA
Shinsaku Hiura, Osaka University, Japan
Takeo Kanade, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Jana Kosecka, George Mason University, USA
Ze-Nian Li, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Xuelong Li, Univ. of London, UK
Suresh Lodha, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Ajmal Saeed Mian, Univ. of Western Australia, Australia
Philippos Mordohai, Stevens Institute of Technology, USA
Ulrich Neumann, University of Southern California, USA
Ramakant Nevatia, University of Southern California, USA
Zhigeng Pan, Zhejiang University, China
Charalambos Poullis, USC, USA
Gerhard Roth, Univ. of Ottawa, Canada
Ioannis Stamos, City University of New York, USA
Rin-ichiro Taniguchi, Kyushu University, Japan
Jun Takamatsu, Nara Inst. of Science & Tech, Japan
Svetha Venkatesh, Curtin Univ. of Technology, Australia
Guanghui Wang, Univ. of Windsor, Canada
John Zelek, Univ. of Waterloo, Canada
Zhigang Zhu, City Univ. of New York, USA

Contacts
--------
For any question about the Modeling-3D 2009 Workshop, please contact to:
modeling3d2009@gmail.com

http://graphics.usc.edu/~suyay/modeling3D2009.htm

PROLEARN Academy Newsletter 2009 - Week 27

*** Events in the next 7 days

8th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL 2009) Place: Aachen, Date: Aug 19, 2009 - Aug 21, 2009
8th International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL 2009), RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, August 19-21, 2009

SIRTEL'09: Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning Date: Aug 21, 2009


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

*** PROLEARN Academy - Measure
Our auto observation tool for scientific communities contains at present 1589 projects, of which 238 are newsfeeds, 95 newsletters, 533 web sites, 69 mailinglists and 654 blogs. The number of caught entries totals 143169 for the feeds, of which 2572 were retrieved last week. For the newsletters totals 3759 entries, of which 14 were retrieved last week, for the mailinglists there are 106089 entries, of which 473 last week and for the blogs there are 235750 entries, of which 1 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 18 new projects. These are the following:

18 Web Pages
* Home: e-Learning Baltics
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* LTfLL - homepage
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* TARGET project
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* ENGAGE Learning
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* Handheld Learning 2009 - Home
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* e-JUMP 2.0 — e-Jump 2.0
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* Graduiertenkolleg E-Learning | Graduiertenkolleg E-Learning an der TU Darmstadt
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* Engaging Learning
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* e-Learning Grid
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* China's massive education grid. - Free Online Library
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* HOME
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* What is Social Network Analysis? by Scott Degraffenreid
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* IT Conversations | MeshForum | Dr. Karen Stephenson (Free Podcast)
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* SPeL 2009 - International Workshop on Social and Personal Computing for Web-Supported Learning Communities
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* ROLE
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* Ar žinai? ::. www.arzinai.lt .::
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* Intcomp - WELCOME TO INT.COMP
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language
* Social Networks in Education » home
-- Category: N.A.; Unknown language

Keynote speakers for ICWL 2009, Aachen, Germany

I am more than proud to announce our keynote speakers for the International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL) 2009 in Aachen Germany on August 19-21, 2009. Please register at the conference website. Early bird discount until July 17, 2009.

Learning in Times of Abundance: The Snowflake Effect
Prof. Erik Duval, Dept. Computerwetenschappen, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Exploiting User Generated Content to Improve Search
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl, Dept. Computer Science, University of Hannover

---

Learning in Times of Abundance: The Snowflake Effect

Abstract: In this keynote, Prof. Erik Duval will discuss how we are evolving towards a global open learning infrastructure with an abundance of learning resources. This is the result of more than 15 years of work on technical standards and interoperability. Abundance is certainly a better situation than the earlier scarcity of resources and creates many opportunities for innovation. However, teachers and learners can be a bit overwhelmed by the large numbers and wide variety of resources and we need to help them to focus on what is relevant to them. The Snowflake Effect is our approach of dealing with this issue, based on massive hyper-personalization.

Erik Duval is a professor of computer science at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His research interests include: metadata, learning objects, a global learning infrastructure based on open standards and mass personalization ("The Snowflake Effect"). Prof. Duval teaches courses on Human-Computer Interaction, Multimedia and Problem Solving and Design. Erik serves as the president of the ARIADNE Foundation, chairs the IEEE LTSC working group on Learning Object Metadata and is a fellow of the AACE. He co-founded two spin- offs that apply research results for access to music and scientific output. See also http://erikduval.wordpress.com/ and http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~erikd/

---

Exploiting User Generated Content to Improve Search

Abstract: More and more information is available on the Web, and the current search engines do a great job to make it accessible. Yet, optimizing for a large number of users, they usually provide good answers only to "most of us", and have yet to provide satisfying mechanisms to search for audiovisual content. In this talk Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl will present some ongoing work at L3S addressing these challenges, done in the context of several European Union funded projects on personal information management and web search.

Regarding search for audiovisual content, I will focus on exploiting user generated information, and discuss what kinds of tags are used for different resources and how they can help for search. Collaborative tagging has become an increasingly popular means for sharing and organizing Web resources, leading to a huge amount of user generated metadata. These tags represent different aspects of the resources they describe and it is not obvious whether and how these tags or subsets of them can be used for search. I will present an in-depth study of tagging behavior for different kinds of resources - Web pages, music, and images. The results are promising and provide more insight into both the use of different kinds of tags for improving search and possible extensions of tagging systems to support the creation of potentially search-relevant tags.
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl (born 1960) has been full professor of computer science at the University of Hannover since 1995. He received his M.Sc. (1984) and Ph.D. degree (1988) at the Technical University of Vienna, was assistant professor in Vienna from 1988 to 1992, and associate professor at the RWTH Aachen from 1992 to 1995. He worked as visiting researcher / professor at Xerox PARC, Stanford University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, EPFL Lausanne, and at PUC Rio.

Prof. Nejdl heads the Distributed Systems Institute / Knowledge Based Systems (http://www.kbs.uni-hannover.de/) as well as the L3S Research Center (http://www.l3s.de/), and does research in the areas of search and information retrieval, semantic web technologies, peer-to-peer information systems, technology-enhanced learning, databases and artificial intelligence. Relevant projects in the L3S context include the PHAROS Integrated Project on audio-visual search, the OKKAM IP focusing on entities on the Web, the Digital Library EU project LiWA, coordinated by L3S, which investigates Web archive management and advanced search in such an archive, and the FET IP project LivingKnowledge, which is developing algorithms and methods to handle and exploit diversity, bias and opinion on the Web.

Wolfgang Nejdl published more than 200 scientific articles, as listed at DBLP, and has been program chair, program committee and editorial board member of numerous international conferences and journals, see also http://www.kbs.uni-hannover.de/~nejdl/

eKNOW 2010 || February 10-15, 2010 - St. Maarten, Netherlands Antilles

CALL FOR PAPERS, TUTORIALS, PANELS

eKNOW 2010: The Second International Conference on Information, Process, and
Knowledge Management

February 10-15, 2010 - St. Maarten, Netherlands Antilles

General page: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2010/eKNOW10.html

Call for Papers: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2010/CfPeKNOW10.html

Submission deadline: September 10, 2009

Sponsored by IARIA, www.iaria.org

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

Please note the Poster Forum and Work in Progress options.

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

eKNOW 2010 Tracks (tracks' topics and submission details: see CfP on the site)

Knowledge fundamentals

Knowledge acquisition, processing, and management; Linguistic knowledge representation; Knowledge modeling and virtualization; Types of knowledge: structural, behavioral, relationships, etc.; Knowledge representation: visual-picture, connectionist model, semi-structured [a la workflow], structured/formal; Knowledge acquisition status: potential new knowledge, guessed semantics, confirmed semantics, auditing confirmed semantics, etc.; Knowledge update: probable insertion, validated insertion, auditing the insertion periodically based on new knowledge, etc.

Knowledge identification and discovery

Mining for knowledge; Knowledge identification: semantic-ID, etc.; Knowledge discovery: how to express knowledge requests?, how to find knowledge?, etc.; Knowledge refinement: after many acquisitions, former knowledge can change semantically or structurally, etc.; Knowledge clustering Knowledge management systems

Knowledge data systems; Industrial systems; Context-aware and self-management systems; Imprecision/Uncertainty/Incompleteness in databases; Cognitive science and knowledge agent-based systems; Databases and mobility in databases; Zero-knowledge systems; Expert systems; Tutoring systems; Digital libraries

Knowledge semantics processing and ontology

Dynamic knowledge ontology; Collaborative knowledge ontology; Knowledge matching; Contextual reasoning; Tools for knowledge ontology; Context-based information extraction; Knowledge trading systems; Knowledge exchange portals; Cognitive sytems and knowledge processing; Human aspects in knowledge processing

Process analysis and modeling

Analysis and development of business architectures; Data mining and information retrieval for business processes; Business process modelling; Business process composition; Analysis and management lifecycle; Reasoning on business processes; Optimization of business processes; Adaptive business processes; Business process reengineering; Integration of processes; Process
discovery; Business process quality; Resource allocation

Process management

Criteria for measurement of business process models; Monitoring business processes; Business process visualization; Management of business process integration; On-demand business transformation; Performance measurement; Conformance and risk management; Prediction; Business transformation; Packaged industry applications; Industry solutions

Information management

Informational mining/retrieval/classification; Geographic and spatial data Infrastructures; Information technologies; Information management systems; Information ethics and legal evaluations; Optimization and information technology; Organizational information systems

Decision support systems

Multi-criteria decision theory; Artificial intelligence; Adaptive design for decision support systems; Support technologies: knowledge-driven, data-driven, model-driven, and geographically-driven systems; Support methods: artificial neural networks, fuzzy logic, and genetic/evolutionary algorithms; Modeling, interfaces, and performance; Applications using decision support systems

IARIA Publicity Board

Committee members: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2010/ComeKNOW10.html

Best Paper Nominees for ICWL 2009

We have published the best paper nominees on the ICWL 2009 web page.

Best Paper Nominees

ordered alphabetically by first author

Bridging the Gap: Adaptive Games and Student-Centered VLEs

Ángel del Blanco, Javier Torrente, Pablo Moreno-Ger and Baltasar Fernández-Manjón.

Applying a Web and Simulation-Based System for Adaptive Competence Assessment of Spinal Anaesthesia

Cord Hockemeyer, Alexander Nussbaumer, Erik Lövquist, Annette Aboulafia, Dorothy Breen, George Shorten and Dietrich Albert.

User Evaluation of a Graphical Modeling Tool for IMS Learning Design

Susanne Neumann and Petra Oberhuemer.

Student Engagement with Peer Assessment: a Review of Pedagogical Design and Technologies

Karen Stepanyan, Richard Mather, Hamilton Jones and Carlo Lusuardi.

Are tags from Mars and descriptors from Venus? A study on the ecology of educational resource metadata

Riina Vuorikari, Martin Sillaots, Silvia Panzavolta and Rob Koper.

Media, Knowledge & Education: Exploring visualized and collaborative knowledge spaces

Call for papers Media, Knowledge & Education: Exploring visualized and
collaborative knowledge spaces for an international conference at the
University of Innsbruck (November 5-6, 2009)

For all the diversity of available analyses of present times and social self-descriptions, recent years have made the special relevance of media increasingly obvious. They function as drivers and catalysts in almost all areas of life. Questions of social change, knowledge organization, cultural encounters, political communication, or community building cannot be adequately discussed without considering processes of mediatization. Micro, meso and macro levels all include phenomena of interdependence and diffusion which have been studied only rudimentary. In this context, the catch phrases "Web 2.0" and "social software" have lately been playing special roles in everyday as well as scientific discourses, yet the assessment of risks and opportunities in regard to knowledge dynamics and knowledge-political topics differs widely. On the one hand, we see the diagnosis of new forms of the social dissemination of knowledge and the description of potentials of satisfying information needs and education requirements. On the other hand, there are warnings about the trivialization of knowledge, the lack of visual competence, and the spread of illiteracy.
The conference focuses on dynamics and transformational processes at the interfaces of IT-supported medial, social, and organizational developments. It targets inter- and transdisciplinary fields of discourse between media and communication theory, between knowledge and education theory, and between (business) information technology, economics, and
pedagogy. Accordingly, the main concern is not devices, equipment, or software products as such, but rather aspects of knowledge organization and media dynamics, the transformation of processes of learning, knowledge and education, and the examination of designs of socio-cultural spaces and of communication processes in media environments.
In the course of this international conference we will apply different perspectives to a variety of topics in connection with

.recent forms of visualizing and virtualizing knowledge
. concepts and practical examples of the collaborative use of digital knowledge tools
.the theory and practice of knowledge management and knowledge politics
.designing knowledge-intensive processes in businesses and organizations
.conceiving organizational and technical infrastructures for learning and knowledge services
.composing learning and knowledge services based on tagging, RSS, and mashup technologies
.knowledge governance - definition of a framework for decisions in regard to adopting tools of knowledge organization
.mobile developments and trends in the professional and personal organization of knowledge
.everyday aesthetics and the application of knowledge tools in everyday contexts
.media dynamics, continuities, and upheavals and their relation to socio-cultural dynamics and knowledge forms
.the performance of cultural practices in formal and informal learning contexts as well as the prospects of new forms of acquisition and communication in knowledge work
.opportunities resulting from the literacy of the eye and the relationship between visual competence and media competence
.concepts of media activism and new practices

The conference is orientated on discourse and will primarily consist of papers with plenary discussions and workshops. The conference languages are English and German.
Conference organizers:
A. Univ. Prof. Dr. Theo Hug (Institute of Educational Sciences) and
Univ. Prof. Dr. Ronald Maier (Institute of Information Systems)
The international conference is hosted by the Innsbruck Media Studies Research Group at the University of Innsbruck, and the Knowledge Management Platform Austria.

Talks, presentations, or posters (images and/or texts) may be submitted.
Academic, technological, and artistic contributions are welcome.

Dates and deadlines:
- July 15, 2009: submission of abstracts (maximum one page, incl. short CV)
- July 31, 2009: notification of speakers
- October 15, 2009: submission of manuscripts
(app. 5000 words incl. references and an abstract of around 150 words)
- December 15, 2009: notification of papers accepted for publication
- March 31, 2010: publication of the conference proceedings

Contact:
Michael Kohlegger
E-mail: michael.kohlegger@uibk.ac.at;

High Speed Information

This video is from the DFG Video Portal on the Excellence Initiative.



On the UMIC Cluster of Excellence at RWTH Aachen University

Wireless internet is supposed to be available everywhere and make ever faster connections possible – to the advantage of the user. These are the goals of the scientists at the “Excellence Cluster” Ultra-High-Speed Information and Communication (UMIC) in Aachen, which is composed interdisciplinary of 21 professorships of the departments of computer science, electrical engineering and information technology, since the insatiable hunger for innovation wants to be appeased. Already today, the scientists are able to realize futuristic appearing projects, e.g. a deformable e-book or the development of a new device for mobile access to the internet solely virtually on a screen. It has the same capabilities as the final real device – without any hardware. Hence, a new device can be fully tested before it is developed, which saves time and costs, important factors in international competition. In order to determine the current level of research and to evaluate possible future progress a day of scientific exchange, the UMIC day, is held annually.

PhD position INRIA Rennes, parallelism, distribution, content-based multimedia retrieval systems

PhD position INRIA Rennes,
parallelism, distribution, content-based multimedia retrieval ystems

Title:

Parallelism and distribution for very large scale content-based multimedia retrieval systems

Place:
INRIA
Campus de Beaulieu
35042 Rennes, FRANCE
http://www.irisa.fr

Advisor:
Laurent Amsaleg
Email: Laurent.Amsaleg@irisa.fr

Proposal:
1) Context

Thanks to Web search engines, digital cameras and camcorders, and sharing platforms such as YouTube or Flickr, it is now very easy to create, copy, store, share, find, and modify digital material. While this increases users' digital experience enjoyment, it also raises many copyright infringement problems as that material is quite often illegally uploaded and used, sometimes by malicious pirates. Various techniques enforcing copyright protection have been developed, including content-based image retrieval systems (CBIRS) where potentially illegal contents is used to query a database containing the material to protect. These systems are extremely complex but quite efficient, i.e., they detect violations even if the stolen material has been severely modified, and they can protect rather large collections of contents.

These systems, however, are still slow: a handful of seconds is needed to check the copyright of one image. They can hardly be used in practice in the real world where throughput is crucial since thousands of verifications per second must be enforced. This is impossible today as they are typically built according to a centralized architecture. It is therefore key to start investigating the issues raised by building very large scale CBIRS on top of architectures supporting distribution and parallelism.

2) Subject
Investigating these issues makes the core of this PhD proposal. This includes designing distributed global memory management policies (prefetching, caching, data shipping, ...), thread scheduling strategies (thread shipping, load balancing, coping with node failures, ...), distributing the queries and the data collection on nodes, etc. All these policies need to take into account the
specificities of CBIRS where approximate nearest-neighbor searches are performed in a multi-dimensional feature space, contrasting with more standard applications also having throughput requirements.

This work will build on state of the art technologies: the CBIRS to start from will be one of the best systems proposed in the literature in terms of efficiency and ability to cope with scale (e.g., NV-tree or VideoGoogle); the underlying Operating System architecture (Kerrighed) is one of the best platforms for providing a single image operating system for high performance computing on clusters.

3) Environment and Fundings
This PhD will take place in the context of the European Project Quaero that aims at building Web-scale content-based multimedia search engines. Therefore, a three year financial support is already available, starting Sept 2009. In addition, the Quaero environment provides opportunities to meet many scientists concerned with these problems, as searching the contents of videos, audio archives, still image collections or even digital libraries asks for throughput
oriented systems.

Starting: september 2009 (can be delayed at most until january 2010)
Duration: 3 years
Profile:
- excellent academic record
- the applicant must have a very solid backgound on operating systems,memory management, distribution and parallelism. No expertise in image (or signal) processing is needed; some knowledge in databases is beneficial. Very good programming skills are required.

When applying, please provide:
- CV and academic record
- recommendation letter(s)

PhD Position at the University of Namur - semantic interoperability of meta-models

PhD Position at the University of Namur - semantic interoperability of meta-models

The PReCISE Research centre of the University of Namur - Belgium (http://www.fundp.ac.be/en/precise) announces the opening of one research position in software engineering.

The project consists in semantic interoperability of meta-models. The position will first be given for a probationary period of one year, before confirming the successful candidate in his PhD project (3-4 years). The salary is competitive. The candidate is expected to start on September 1st, 2009.

PREREQUISITES AND APPLICATION MATERIALS
- Good Master's degrees in Computer Science or closely related disciplines;
- Good knowledge of data models, distributed systems, software engineering, and excellent programming skills;
- Good knowledge of English is required;

APPLICATIONS

Interested candidates should send **by email only**, preferably by July, 5, 2009
- an application letter, indicating research area of interest (software engineering, cooperative systems, web semantics, model driven engineering).
- a detailed CV, including a list of courses completed and marks received.
- an electronic copy of any relevant material (thesis, reports, ...).
- proof of English proficiency.

to

Professor Vincent ENGLEBERT
Faculty of Computer Science
University of Namur, Belgium
vincent.englebert(AT)info.fundp.ac.be

AND

Professor Philippe THIRAN
Faculty of Computer Science
University of Namur, Belgium
pthiran(AT)fundp.ac.be

ENVIRONMENT

The PReCISE research centre (http://www.fundp.ac.be/en/precise) is the Belgian centre of excellence in Information systems management and engineering. The group involves more than 40 researchers including professors, post-doc's and PhD students.

The Faculty of Computer Science is one of the oldest European faculties in Information System. It has about 400 students, 80 staff members, out of whom 16 are full-time professors and 50 are
researchers. Established in 1969, the Faculty of Computer Science has graduated more than 1.600 students, all of them with highly appreciated qualifications at the international level. The FUNDP is a midsize university of about 5,000 students, and is a member of the Académie Universitaire Louvain comprising about 30,000 students. It has developed intensive collaboration with many national and international universities and research centres.

Capital of Wallonia, Namur is a charming city of 100,000 inhabitants located 50 km south of Brussels and 2h30 from Paris and London.

ISCRAM Summer School: New Technologies for Crisis Management

3rd ISCRAM SUMMER SCHOOL ON NEW TECHNOLOGIES IN CRISIS MANAGEMENT

Tilburg University, the Netherlands --

Citizen Participation for Crisis Response and Management

http://www.iscram.org or join ISCRAM on Facebook!

20-28 August 2009, Tilburg, the Netherlands

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION -- Late registration is now OPEN until July 5

INTRODUCTION:

We are pleased to announce the 3rd edition of the ISCRAM Summer School on New Technologies in Crisis Management. This summer school series successfully started in 2006, offering a top level program at Tilburg University for students from all over the world.

Participants will gain insights from information systems for crisis response and management and emerging themes in the area of citizen participation in crisis preparedness and response. Participants will have ample opportunity to discuss their work with other researchers and practitioners.

The Summer School is intended to be an intellectually and socially stimulating environment, and expected to result in active networking long after the summer school is over.

PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS:

* Interactive Lectures with leading experts from academia and research labs, the United Nations, and practice
* Social Activities
* Dinner Challenge Talks by Special Guests
* Full day site visit (secret location)
* Full day exercise in the City of Tilburg

LECTURERS (list incomplete):

* Professor Simon French (Manchester Business School, UK)
* Dr. Susanne Jul (Amaryllis Consulting, USA)
* Dr. Tom De Groeve (ISPRA, Italy)
* Erik Kastlander (UN OCHA, Geneva)
* Craig Duncan (UN ISDR, Geneva)
* Paul Burghardt (DECIS Labs, the Netherlands)
* Jonas Landgren (Viktoria Institute, Sweden)
* Professor Piet Ribbers (Tilburg University, the Netherlands)

CURRENT PARTICIPANTS:

We have confirmed participants from the USA, Canada, Turkey, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, the UK and Vietnam - a truly global group!

WHO SHOULD ATTEND:

Students in PhD programs in Information Systems, Computer Science, Organization Research, Management Science, and Operations Research or in other fields with research interests related to crisis management are eligible for nomination. The nominee should have completed course work, developed a dissertation proposal and preferably have completed one year of
dissertation work with one year remaining (at the time of the summer school) before completion.

BENEFITS FROM ATTENDING:

Participants will gain insights in the use of information systems for crisis response and management and become informed of emerging themes in the area of community and citizen crisis preparedness and response. All students will be stimulated to interact and discuss their work with the experts. The Summer School is intended to be an intellectually and socially stimulating environment, and expected to result in active networking long after the
Summer School is over.

At the Summer School, participants are expected to work in groups whose tasks include:

- analysis and discussion of relevant crises cases;
- study the role of IT/IS in citizen and community preparedness and response;
- exercising, gaming and role playing;
- use of dedicated crisis response decision support software.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE:

Please contact the Program Committee (email address: summerschool2009@iscram.org) immediately if you are interested in attending. Include a Curriculum Vitae with your email. You will be informed of further procedures.

COST:

The late registration tuition fee is 600 EUR, plus 600 Euro which will cover full accommodation during the entire week (in a single room at Hotel De Postelse Hoeve), lunches and dinners (except for the weekend). Tuition fee covers lectures, excursion and other organized social events.

VENUE:

With a population of nearly 200,000 inhabitants, Tilburg is the Netherlands' sixth largest city and is located in the South of the country, close to the Belgian border, in the Province of 'North Brabant'. For more information on the Netherlands and Tilburg, see
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/worldguide/destinations/europe/netherlands/

ACCOMMODATION:

The Summer School classes will be held at the Campus of Tilburg University in Tilburg ( http://www.tilburguniversity.nl ). Accommodation is provided in Hotel Postelse Hoeve in Tilburg, which is conveniently located within biking distance from the University campus. Bikes will be provided to all participants.

LID 09 - International Workshop on Logic in Databases

International Workshop on Logic in Databases

Roskilde University, Denmark, 29-30 October 2009

http://LID2009.ruc.dk

CALL FOR PAPERS - submission deadline July 10, 2009

Notification: August 21, 2009

Ever since Codd's Relational Model, logic has played a major role in the field of databases. The significance and impact of this role have grown stronger over the years as data management research marched through many a data model, with logic keeping up and providing the foundations every step of the way. Some of the latest additions to this long list of models are XML, semantic web, probabilistic relational models, integrated model of DB+IR, data integration models, and models of unclean data to name a few. For some of these, corresponding logics already exist or are being explored. The significance of logic's role for data management will
continue regardless of the data model. Logic is a fundamental tool for understanding and analyzing several aspects of data management. The Logic in Databases workshop, LID 2009, is a forum for bringing together researchers from around the world who are focusing on all logical
aspects of data management.

The present LID workshop series started with LID'08 in Rome as the confluence of three successful events series which had a strong overlap in interests.

* LID'96, an international workshop on Logic in Databases, which LID 2008 derives its name from
* LAAIC'05 and LAAIC'06, international workshops on Logical Aspects and Applications of Integrity Constraints
* IIDB'06, an international workshop on Inconsistency and Incompleteness in Databases

The workshop will be focused on applications of logic to every aspect of database management and related topics. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following, as they pertain to logic in databases:

* consistent query answering
* data exchange
* data mining
* data warehousing and OLAP for novel forms of data
* database repairing
* DB + IR
* incomplete information
* inconsistency tolerance
* inductive databases
* knowledge discovery
* logical approaches to inconsistency
* logic programming
* nonmonotonic reasoning
* ordered data/query models (top-K)
* privacy/security
* semantic web
* social networks
* uncertain data (fuzzy, probabilistic, etc.) and imprecision

LID 2009 will have informal proceedings; details about the proceedings are found at http://LID2009.ruc.dk/Procs.html. Each submission will be reviewed by an international program committee; see listing below. Submissions must include original and previously unpublished results. A volume at an international publisher or a special journal issue will be considered for selected and revised papers, if number and quality of submissions permit.

Submission deadline is submission deadline July 1, 2009; see details at http://LID2009.ruc.dk

The workshop will take place in the historical city of Roskilde, Denmark
- city of vikings and kings, the fjord, the little harbour, etc. -
on 29-30 October 2009.

LID is co-located with FQAS 2009 that takes place the days up to LID,
26-28 October 2009.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

* Foto Afrati (Th. U. Athens)
* Pablo Barcelo (U. de Chile)
* Leopoldo Bertossi (Carleton University) (Co-chair)
* Alexander Borgida (Rutgers U.)
* Loreto Bravo (U. Concepcion)
* Henning Christiansen (Roskilde University) (Co-chair)
* Marc Denecker (K.U. Leuven)
* Wenfei Fan (University of Edinburgh)
* Floris Geerts (U. Edinburgh)
* Bart Kuijpers (Hasselt U.)
* Georg Lausen (Universität Freiburg)
* Sebastian Link (University of Wellington)
* Maarten Marx (U. Amsterdam)
* Riccardo Rosati (U. Roma)
* Marie-Christine Rousset (U. Grenoble)
* Francesco Scarcello (U. Calabria)
* Dan Suciu (University of Washington)
* Val Tannen (U. Pennsylvania)
* David Toman (U. Waterloo)
* Jef Wijsen (Université de Mons-Hainaut)
* Peter Wood (Birbeck College)

I-KNOW 09 - Call for Participation

Call for Participation

I-KNOW 2009

International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies

2-4 September 2009

Graz, Austria

http://www.i-know.at

I-KNOW '09 brings together international researchers (English speaking scientific part) and practitioners (German speaking industry part, Praxisforum) from the fields of knowledge management and knowledge technologies. Opening and closing keynotes, an international cooperation-event and a conference-wide exhibition complete the I-KNOW conference program. I-KNOW '09 will be held concurrently with I-SEMANTICS '09 - International Conference on Semantic Systems. This special concept aims at bridging the gaps between the various communities and their technology fields.

I-KNOW will offer its participants a unique platform either to present latest and leading edge developments or to catch up with the developments of most innovative IT technologies, content applications, knowledge management trends and emerging market opportunities.

The program includes about 90 scientific presentations from all over the world. A German-speaking industry track offers further 30 industry presentations and an exhibition. The presentations cover, but are not limited to the following topics…

· Basics and Theories

· Knowledge Work Support

· Semantic Technologies

· Knowledge Services

· Knowledge Relationship Discovery

· Knowledge Visualization

· Innovative Approaches to Knowledge Management

· Knowledge Management and Web 2.0

For more detailed information please visit the website.

Three internationally renowned experts will give keynote presentations.

· Paolo Traverso, FBK, Italy

· Eric Tsui, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China

· Peter Kropsch, Austrian Press Agency, Austria

New book "Metamodeling for Method Engineering" by MIT Press published

Image prepared by Martin Frericks.

I am more than happy to announce that finally MIT Press published the book "Metamodeling for Method Engineering" edited by Manfred A. Jeusfeld, Matthias Jarke and John Mylopoulos. It can be ordered from MIT Press and from major bookstores. A short introduction is given below.

This text is a guide to the foundations of method engineering, a developing field concerned with the definition of techniques for designing software systems. The approach is based on metamodeling, the construction of a model about a collection of other models. The book applies the metamodeling approach in five case studies, each describing a solution to a problem in a specific domain. Suitable for classroom use, the book is also useful as a reference for practitioners.

The book first presents the theoretical basis of metamodeling for method engineering, discussing information modeling, the potential of metamodeling for software systems development, and the introduction of the metamodeling tool ConceptBase. The second, and larger, portion of the book reports on applications of the metamodeling approach to method engineering. These detailed case studies range from telecommunication service specification, hypermedia design, and data warehousing to cooperative requirements engineering, chemical device modeling, and design of new abstraction principles of modeling languages. Although these chapters can stand alone as case studies, they also relate to the earlier theoretical chapters. The metamodeling approach described in the book is based on the Telos metamodeling language implemented by the ConceptBase system. An accompanying CD-ROM contains the ConceptBase system and a large collection of Telos metamodels discussed in the text. The CD-ROM enables readers to start directly with method engineering, from small method chunks up to complete method definitions. The complete definition of Ed Yourdon's structured analysis method is included as an instructional example.

The table of content can be found here. There are also some sample chapters for download.

Series Foreword
Introduction
1 A Sophisticate’s Guide to Information Modeling - Alex Borgida and John Mylopoulos
2 Metamodeling - Matthias Jarke, Ralf Klamma and Kalle Lyytinen 43
3 Metamodeling and Method Engineering with ConceptBase - Manfred A. Jeusfeld 89
4 Conceptual Modeling in Telecommunications Service Design - Armin Eberlein 169
5 Metadata for Hypermedia Textbooks - From RDF to O-Telos and Back - Martin Wolpers and Wolfgang Nejdl 233
6 Monitoring Requirements Development with Goals - William N. Robinson 257
7 Definition of Semantic Abstraction Principles - Mohamed Dahchour and Alain Pirotte 295
8 Metadatabase Design for Data Warehouses - Christoph Quix 329
9 A Conceptual Information Model for the Chemical Process Design Lifecycle - Birgit Bayer and Wolfgang Marquardt 357
List of Contributors
Index

Congratulations to the editors!

PROLEARN Academy Newsletter 2009 - Week 26

*** Events in the next 7 days

Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks (CASoN 2009)
Date: Jun 24, 2009 - Jun 27, 2009


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


*** New Call For Papers

Future Learning Landscapes: Towards the Convergence of Pervasive and Contextual computing, Global Social Media and Semantic Web in Technology Enhanced Learning
Call-Art: Workshop, Paper submission deadline: Jul 31, 2009
Future Learning Landscapes: Towards the Convergence of Pervasive and Contextual computing,Global Social Media and Semantic Web in Technology Enhanced Learning a workshop of EC-TEL 2009 NICE, FRANCE September 29 or 30, 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 1572 projects, of which 238 are newsfeeds, 95 newsletters, 515 web sites, 70 mailinglists and 654 blogs. The number of caught entries totals 141188 for the feeds, of which 5244 were retrieved last week. For the newsletters totals 3745 entries, of which 19 were retrieved last week, for the mailinglists there are 105634 entries, of which 357 last week and for the blogs there are 235750 entries, of which 635 last week.

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

We are continuously enlarging our project database.

SeMuDaTe2009 - Workshop on Semantic Multimedia Database Technologies

Call for Contributions

SeMuDaTe2009 - Workshop on Semantic Multimedia Database Technologies
10th International Workshop of the Multimedia Metadata Community

The workshop is collocated with the 4th International Conference on
Semantic and Digital Media Technologies

2-4 December 2009
Graz, Austria

http://semudate2009.fim.uni-passau.de/

The Workshop on Semantic Multimedia Database Technologies (SeMuDaTe2009) searches for research contributions on the mapping and integration of multimedia metadata and ontologies into databases, on multimedia query languages, on the optimization and processing of semantic queries. Moreover, we are interested how multimedia data services are conceived to ensure interoperability, how to improve security and reliability of access and storage of multimedia data and metadata. It is the 10th International Workshop of the Multimedia Metadata Community:
http://www.multimedia-metadata.info/

Contributions

We invite the following types of contributions:

* Full papers (8-12 Pages)
* Position papers (4-8 Pages)
* Poster and Demo papers (3-4 Pages)

Submissions should be formatted according to LNCS style and submitted in PDF format. Please use the link below for your submission. The workshop proceedings will be published as a volume at CEUR Workshop Proceedings. Selected papers will appear in a special issue of an international journal.

In case of questions please contact Florian.Stegmaier@uni-passau.de.

Topics

* Multimedia metadata models and mappings to databases
* Multimedia ontology and interoperability
* Multimedia ontology to database mapping and processing
* Multimedia query optimization and processing
* Ontology query languages and multimedia
* Semantic retrieval in multimedia databases
* Database management: security, indexing, reliability, distribution, transactions
* Indexing strategies for multimedia databases
* Semantic enrichment and annotation of multimedia
* Semantic metadata management
* Uncertainty in multimedia databases
* Human-computer interfaces for multimedia database access
* Mobile multimedia database services
* Context-aware multimedia
* Semantic adaptation of multimedia
* Proactive semantic multimedia delivery & distribution services
* Self-organization in service oriented multimedia architectures
* Semantic multimedia demonstrations and applications

Important Dates

All Papers

September 7, 2009 - Deadline for Workshop Papers
September 28, 2009 - Notification of Acceptance for Workshop Papers
October 19, 2009 - Camera-ready Workshop Papers due

General and Local Chairs
Harald Kosch, University Passau, Germany
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Mathias Lux, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Florian Stegmaier, Local Chair, University Passau, Germany

Workshop Technical Programme Committee
* Anna Carreras (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain)
* Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain)
* Bill Grosky (University of Michigan, USA)
* Christian Guetl (Graz University of Technology, Austria)
* Dominik Renzel (RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany)
* François Bry (LMU, University of Munich, Germany)
* Giuseppe Amato (ISTI Pisa, Italy)
* Laszlo Böszörmenyi (Klagenfurt University, Austria)
* Marc Spaniol (MPI, Saarbrücken, Germany)
* Markus Strohmaier (Know Center, Graz, Austria)
* Oge Marques (Florida Atlantic University, USA)
* Pascal Hitzler (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
* Richard Chbeir (Bourgogne University, France)
* Romulus Grigoras (ENSEEIHT, France)
* Savvas Chatzichristofis (Democritus University of Thrace, Greece)
* Thierry Delot (University of Valenciennes, France)
* Timothy Shih (NTUE, Taiwan)
* Vincent Oria (NJIT, USA)
* Werner Bailer (Joanneum Research, Graz, Austria)
* Yiwei Cao (RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany)
* Lionel Brunie (INSA de Lyon, France)
* Yu Cao (California State University at Fresno, USA)

EC-TEL 2009 Workshops - Call for Papers

Here is the list of EC-TEL 2009 workshops with call for papers on my blog.

• Web2.0 approaches, tools and technologies to support research on Technology Enhanced Learning (TELSci2.0)


• 3rd International Workshop on Building Technology Enhanced Learning solutions for CoPs (TEL-CoPs'09)
  


• Methods & Tools for Computer Supported Collaborative Creativity Process


• 2nd Workshop on Mashup Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE09)


• 1st Workshop Learning Management Systems meet Adaptive Learning Environments (LMS-ALE)
  


• SEMHE '09 - Semantic Web Applications for Learning and Teaching Support in Higher Education

Web2.0 approaches, tools and technologies to support research on Technology Enhanced Learning (TELSci2.0)

(((Also Erik is organising a workshop at the EC-TEL 2009 conference. Please submit!)))

SCIENCE2.0 FOR TEL: Call for Papers

1st Workshop on Web2.0 approaches, tools and technologies to support

research on Technology Enhanced Learning (TELSci2.0)

at the 4th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning

(EC-TEL09), Nice, France, September 29 - October 2, 2009

http://stellarnet.eu/science2ectel/

SCOPE

In Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), the use of web2.0 technologies is now actively being researched, under banners such as "Personal Learning Environments" or "Open Learning Environments" and the like. In this workshop, we want to discuss how we can leverage the same opportunities for our research on TEL. Indeed, as researchers in Technology Enhanced Learning we already know how to include things like blogs, wikis and forums into the heart of our work to enhance collaborative working, but a full "Science 2.0" framework might provide us with a much more powerful framework to make our research more effective. This workshop aims to bring together all those who want to turn a vision of the e-scholar and e-scientist of the 21st Century into reality in our own domain of TEL.


The core of significant development in a "2.0 world" is

* leveraging web2.0 technologies (that rely on the "social graph") for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of how we conduct science;
* the capacity to share and reuse data, and to benchmark scientific activity in the international community.

Key questions for this workshop include:
* How do we mesh social web2.0 technologies with the scientific workflow?
* How do we share the data of our activity wider in our community?
* How do we visualize that data and how do we provide researchers with powerful new frameworks for their scientific endeavor?


Early generic tools for science2.0 are beginning to appear:

* http://www.scivee.tv/,
* http://www.academiccommons.org/,
* http://www.academia.edu/,
* http://www.researchgate.net/,
* http://www.mendeley.com/,
* http://www.escidoc.org/,
* http://www.authormapper.com/,
* http://www.surfspace.nl/wiki/display/widgetswetenschappers/Home,
* http://www.plos.org/,
* http://www.openwetware.org/,
* http://www.galaxyzoo.org/,
* http://bosch.informatik.rwth-aachen.de:5080/AERCS/
* http://www.rkbexplorer.com/
* http://ariadne.cs.kuleuven.be/edmedia/
* etc.

However, most of these focus more on the sciences. There is some discussion in blogosphere about how we could make use of science2.0 opportunities for TEL. Yet, there has not been a dedicated workshop or conference on this theme. That is the missing piece that this workshop wants to fill in, in the hope of moving forward this idea and accelerating the evolution that has considerable promise of improving how we conduct research on TEL.



FORMAT

The workshop will be highly interactive: presentations will be clustered and presenters will not only discuss their own work, but also to explicitly comment on the work of the other presenters in their session. We will make all the papers available beforehand, so as to facilitate this.


Participants will also be asked to do a 5 min vlog posting to the workshop web site before the event. (This will be a requirement for registration!) We will ask the editors of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies to host a special issue of the re-worked papers after the workshop.



ORGANISATION

This half-day workshop is supported by the STELLAR EU Network of Excellence in Technology Enhanced Learning; http://stellarnet.eu The workshop is organized by

* Erik Duval (K.U.Leuven, Belgium)
* Peter Scott (Open University, UK)
* Stefanie Lindstaedt (KnowCenter, Austria)
* Nicolas Balacheff (UJF, France)

SUBMISSIONS

Authors are invited to submit original unpublished research as papers (4-8 pages). Including demonstrations is explicitly encouraged. All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three members of the program committee for originality, significance, clarity, and quality. All questions and submissions should be sent to: erik.duval@cs.kuleuven.be

IMPORTANT DATES

* Paper Submission: July 5, 2009
* Results Notification: July 20, 2009
* Camera Ready Submission: September 1, 2009
* Workshop Date: September 29 or 30, 2009

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE

* Martin Ebner (Technische Universitat Graz, Austria)
* Jean Marie Favre (Universite Joseph Fourier, France)
* Barbara Kieslinger (Zentrum fur Soziale Innovation, Austria) (tbc)
* Chad J. Kainz (University of Chicago, USA) (tbc)
* Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
* Erica Melis (Deutsche Forschungszentrum fur Kunstliche Intelligenz, Germany)
* Xavier Ochoa (Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral, Ecuador)
* Andreas Schmidt (Forschungszentrum Informatik, Germany)
* George Siemens (University of Manitoba, Canada)
* Katrien Verbert (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium)
* Martin Weller (The Open University, UK)
* Fridolin Wild (The Open University, UK)
* Martin Wolpers (Fraunhofer-Institut fur Angewandte Informationstechnik, Germany)

ABOUT EC-TEL09

After three successful EC-TEL conferences in 2006, 2007, and 2008, the Fourth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning provides a unique forum for all research related to TEL, among them education, psychology, and computer science. The contributions will cover the design of innovative environments, the implementation of new technological solutions, results of empirical studies on socio-cognitive processes in learning, and field studies regarding the use of technologies in context.

EC-TEL is a competitive and broad forum for TEL research in Europe and beyond. In its specialised accompanying workshops and the highlighting main conference programme, EC-TEL09 provides unique networking possibilities for participating researchers throughout the week and includes project meetings and discussions for ongoing and new research activities supported by the European Commission. See http://www.ectel09.org/ for details.

Special Issue on Bridging the Gap - Data Mining and Social Network Analysis, for integrating Semantic Web and Web 2.0

(((I like the ability of the Semantic Web folks in identifying successful research :-) )))

Call for Papers

Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics

***** Special Issue on "Bridging the Gap" *****
Data Mining and Social Network Analysis
for integrating Semantic Web and Web 2.0

/* http://www.kde.cs.uni-kassel.de/events/jws_special_issue_2010 */

Abstract submission: 21 September 2009
Submission deadline: 1 October 2009
Reviews due: 1 December 2009
Notification: 15 December 2009
Final version submitted: 15 January 2010
Publication: April 2010

Focus of the Special Issue
--------------------------

The last years have seen increasing collaboration of researchers from the Semantic Web, Web 2.0, social network analysis and machine learning communities. Applications that use these research results are achieving economic success. Data now become available that allow researchers to analyze the use, acceptance and evolution of their ideas.

Highly popular user-centered applications such as Blogs, social tagging systems, and Wikis have come to be known as "Web 2.0". A major reason for their immediate success is the high ease of use of new Web 2.0 services. These sites do not only provide data but also generate an abundance of weakly structured metadata. A good example is tagging. Here, users add keywords from an uncontrolled vocabulary, called tags, to a resource. Such metadata are easy to
produce, but lack any kind of formal grounding, as used in the Semantic Web.

The Semantic Web can complement the bottom-up effort of the Web 2.0 community in a top-down manner. Its central point is a stronger knowledge representation based on some kind of ontology with a fixed vocabulary and typed relations. Such a structure is typically something users have in mind when they provide their information in Web 2.0 systems. However, for further use, this structure is hidden in the data and needs to be extracted. Techniques to analyze network structures or weak knowledge representations as can be found in the Web 2.0 have a long tradition in different other disciplines, like social network analysis, machine learning and data mining. These kinds of automatic mechanisms are necessary to extract the hidden
information and to reveal the structure in a way that the end user can benefit from it. Using established methods to represent knowledge gained from unstructured data will also be beneficial for the Web 2.0 in that it provides Web 2.0 users with enhanced Semantic Web features to structure their data.

For this special issue, we invite contributions which show how synergies between Semantic Web and Web 2.0 techniques can be successfully used. Since both communities work on network-like data structures, analysis methods from different fields of research could form a link between those communities. Techniques can be - but are not limited to - social network analysis, graph analysis, machine learning and data mining methods.

Topics of interest
------------------
Topics of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to:

* ontology learning from Web 2.0 data
* instance extraction from Web 2.0 systems
* analysis of Blogs
* discovering social structures and communities
* predicting trends and user behaviour
* analysis of dynamic networks
* using content of the Web for modelling
* discovering misuse and fraud
* network analysis of social resource sharing systems
* analysis of folksonomies and other Web 2.0 data structures
* analysis of Web 2.0 applications and their data
* deriving profiles from usage
* personalized delivery of news and journals
* Semantic Web personalization
* Semantic Web technologies for recommender systems
* ubiquitous data mining in Web (2.0) environment
* applications

In accordance with the focus of the journal, the relatedness of your submission to the Semantic Web will be an important evaluation criterion.

Submission Details
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Submissions should describe original contributions and should not have been published or submitted elsewhere. Submissions based on conference papers should be extended and include a reference to the corresponding proceedings. All submissions will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. Final decisions on accepted papers will be approved by an editor in chief.

Manuscripts should be prepared for publication in accordance with instructions given in the "Guide for Authors":

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/671322/authorinstructions

The submission and review process will be carried out using Elsevier's Web-based EES system, cf. http://ees.elsevier.com/jws/default.asp

Guest Editors
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* Bettina Berendt, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven,
Bettina.Berendt@cs.kuleuven.be
* Andreas Hotho, University of Würzburg,
hotho@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
* Gerd Stumme, University of Kassel,
stumme@cs.uni-kassel.de

ASONAM 2009 - Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining

The international conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining
(ASONAM 2009)
http://www.asonam.org/
July 20-22, 2009
Athens, Greece

The study of social networks originated in social and business communities. In recent years, social network research has advanced significantly; the development of sophisticated techniques for Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM) has been highly influenced by the online social websites, email logs, phone logs and instant messaging systems, which are widely analyzed using graph theory and machine learning techniques. People perceive the web increasingly as a social medium that fosters interaction among people, sharing of experiences and knowledge, group activities, community formation and evolution. This can be seen as rising prominence of SNAM in academia, politics, homeland security and business. Many entities of our society evolved into networks in which actors are increasingly dependent on their structural embedding.

The international conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2009) http://www.asonam.org/ will primarily provide an interdisciplinary venue that will bring together practitioners and researchers from a variety of field to promote collaborations and exchange of ideas and practices. ASONAM 2009 is intended to address important aspects with a specific focus on the emerging trends and industry needs associated with social networking analysis and mining. The conference solicits experimental and theoretical work on social network analysis and mining along with its applications to real life situations.

We are putting together very rich academic and social programs. The academic program include three keynote speakers and a number of high quality papers to be presented by researchers from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. The social program includes a wonderful banquet on the cruise. Overall, participating in ASONAM2009 will be a wonder experience to always remember. The final program is now available at the conference website: http://www.asonam.org/.

To help you plan your trip to Athens, we started to issue invitation letters to registered participants and authors. Even if you plan to travel with your spouse/ partner we will be happy to include his/her name in the invitation letter. Such letters were very helpful in the previous years and we have a number of couples showing up in Athens.

In case you need an invitation letter, please do register and send us the full name as printed in the passport at asonam2009@hau.gr. We will send you the invitation letter by email. Our past experience shows that the embassy accepts print out of the letters sent by email.

Nasrullah Memon and Reda Alhajj

Program Chairs ASONAM 2009