PhD Studentship at the Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK

PHD STUDENTSHIP AT THE KNOWLEDGE MEDIA INSTITUTE, THE OPEN UNIVERSITY, UK
Based in Milton Keynes

The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute (KMi, http://kmi.open.ac.uk) has an opening for a PhD student to undertake research on applying Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services technologies within the field of internet-based TV provisioning. The work will take place within the EU-funded project NoTube (http://notube.org). In particular, Semantic web Services technology such as WSMO and IRS-III will play a major role for the work of KMi, while integration with general-purpose Semantic Web standards such as RDF and OWL is of concern as well.

KMi is a highly successful interdisciplinary research centre founded at The Open University in 1995, and located in attractive premises at The Open University's main campus in Milton Keynes, UK. We offer a stimulating environment, widely acknowledged to be at the leading edge of research and development, particularly in semantic web technologies, multimedia and information systems, knowledge modelling and management, new media for learning and sensemaking. KMi is part of the OU's Centre for Research in Computing, ranked as one of the top 20 research centres in the UK RAE 2008. The style, impact and content of our work can be seen at http://kmi.open.ac.uk/.

Applicants should have a first or upper second class honours degree or masters degree in computer science, information systems or related discipline. The successful applicant should have the following skills:

* Familiarity with existing Semantic Web and/or Semantic Web Services standards and technologies (e.g. RDF, OWL, WSMO)
* Strong interest in next generation TV applications and/or digital TV and multimedia content management and metadata handling
* Ability to handle constructive feedback
* Ability to work in a team
* Ability to work to deadlines
* Good verbal and written communication skills
* A plus: experience in development of Knowledge-based systems and Semantic
Web applications

HOW TO APPLY:
For detailed information and how to apply go to http://kmi.open.ac.uk/studentships/networks-ontologies-transforming-broadcasting.php

Informal enquiries can be made to Dr. Stefan Dietze (s.dietze@open.ac.uk, Tel: +44 (0)1908 858217).

ACM MMSJ Special Issue on Multimedia Intelligent Services and Technologies

Special Issue on Multimedia Intelligent Services and Technologies

ACM Multimedia Systems Journal

Guest Editors:
Zhiwen Yu, Artur Lugmayr, Konstantinos Chorianopoulos,
Tao Mei

The rapid development of digital media technologies enables the emergence of novel media content types for eCommerce, eEducation, and digital entertainment. The advances in communication and microelectronics have led to a transition from traditional computer-centric to human-centric information access mode, generally known
as Pervasive or Ubiquitous Computing. It allows a person to use a variety of pervasive end devices, such as personal computer, personal data assistant (PDA), and mobile phone, to access media contents. The combination of these two trends holds the potential of providing a user with seamless and ubiquitous access to rich and dynamic multimedia resources.

With the emergence of ubiquitous and pervasive computation, distributed devices embedded in the natural human environment are getting more and more intelligent. This enables more advanced multimedia services far beyond video streaming. These include personalization, smart homes, semantic locative media, and context awareness. There are several new technical challenges for effective and appropriate content delivery to pervasive user-terminals.First, different users may have different needs. Nowadays, multimedia content is absolutely
overabundant, while the portion of which a user really desired is very small. Second,
pervasive end devices usually have various capabilities (e.g., screen size, color depth, video/audio codec, memory, CPU speed, and electrical power), and network connection and transmission bandwidth might be changing dynamically. Therefore, intelligent multimedia services are expected for efficient storage, search, filtering, adaptation, and presentation of media content, to deliver an ubiquitous and personalized media experience for each user. Multimedia intelligent services and technologies have attracted much interest in both industry and academia over the last decade.

This special issue will accept original research papers that report the latest results and advances in the field of multimedia intelligent systems and services. It also will invite review articles that focus on the state-of-the-art concepts, solutions, trends and challenges in this area. The papers will be peer reviewed and will be selected on the basis of their quality and relevance to the theme of this special issue.

Topics

Topics include (but are not limited to):

- Multimedia personalization, filtering, search, adaptation
- Group recommendation
- Collaborative pervasive services
- Intelligent user interfaces
- Pervasive multimedia
- Semantic web for multimedia intelligent services
- Multimedia service composition
- Context-awareness in multimedia services
- Distributed and collaborative multimedia services
- Architectures and platforms for multimedia intelligent services
- Multimedia intelligent applications in entertainment, e-learning, culture, surveillance
- Evaluation of multimedia intelligent systems
- Social aspects in ubiquitous multimedia
- Situated interaction design and universal access
- Artful and playful applications

Important Dates

Full manuscript due: Oct. 1, 2009
Notification of the first review process: Dec. 15, 2009
Final acceptance notification: Feb. 20, 2010
Final manuscript due: Mar. 1, 2010
Publication date: Summer 2010 (Tentative)

Paper Submission

Submitting authors should follow the Author Guidelines available from http://www.ifi.uio.no/MMSJ/author.html. Manuscripts must be submitted in the form of PDF file to the submission
system: http://namu.cs.tut.fi/WWW/OpenConf/2009ZhiwenYu/openconf.php.
Information about the manuscript (title, full list of authors, corresponding author's contact,
abstract, and keywords) should be also sent to the corresponding editor Zhiwen Yu (zhiweny@gmail.com). Best papers in the field of multimedia intelligent systems
of UIC-09 (The 6th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence and
Computing, http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~uic09/) can be extended and invited to this
special issue. The UIC-09 extended versions must have at least 30% difference from their
original papers and will receive further peer review.

Guest Editors

Zhiwen Yu, Northwestern Polytechnical University, P. R. China, Email: zhiwenyu@nwpu.edu.cn
Artur Lugmayr, Tampere University of Technology, Finland, Email: lartur@cs.tut.fi
Konstantinos Chorianopoulos, Ionian University, Greece, Email: choko@ionio.gr
Tao Mei, Microsoft Research Asia, P. R. China, Email: tmei@microsoft.com

IWAW 2009 -- Deadline extended till August 6

***** EXTENDED DEADLINE **** August 6, 2009 ****

Call for papers

9th International Web Archiving Workshop
Sep. 30 - Oct. 1 2009, Corfu, Greece

Objectives:

The International Web Archiving Workshop (IWAW) series, organized since 2001, provides a cross domain overview on active research and practice in all domains concerned with the acquisition, maintenance and preservation of digital objects for long-term access, with a particular focus on web archiving and studies on effective usage of this type of archives. It is also intended to provide a forum for interaction among librarians, archivists, academic and industrial researchers interested in establishing effective methods and developing improved solutions for data acquisition, ingest, and accessibility maintenance

IWAW 2009 will take place the 30th of September and 1st of October 2009, in conjunction with ECDL in Corfu (Greece). Being the main event in this domain, the workshop will provide a cross
domain overview on active research and practice in all domains concerned with the preservation of the Web.

Important Dates:

- Paper submission July 26th, 2009.
- Notification of acceptance: August 24th, 2009
- Camera-ready copy due: September 10th, 2009
- Workshop: September 30th and 1st of October, 2009

Please post submission using ACM template at
https://stdev.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/iwaw.

Topics:

Case studies:

• Web Archiving Projects,
• Web trends study,
• Digital Archeology,
• Web Metrics,
• Web Publishing Models,
• Large scale storage and data quality .

Data acquisition:

• Harvesting Technology,
• Web Application-aware Crawling,
• Focus crawling,
• Deep Web Capture,
• Acquisition of AJAX and Flash based sites,
• Social web
• Virtual world
• Rich Media capture
• Web Spam detection.

Access:

• Archive Temporal Navigation,
• Large Scale Web Indexing,
• Web Temporal Mining,
• Collection Analysis,
• Information Retrieval applied to Web Archives,
• Digital preservation of Web data,
• Interface Models.

Policy and Social Issues:

• Economics of Information,
• Intellectual Property Rights for the Internet,
• Challenges and Caveats of Web Archives,
• Scenarios and Visions,
• Privacy Aspects.

Workshop Officials:

Chair:
- Julien Masanès (European Archive Foundation, France and Netherlands).
- Andreas Rauber (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)
- Marc Spaniol (Max Planck Institute, Germany)

Program Committee:

- Bjarne Andersen (netarkivet.dk, Denmark)
- Martha Anderson (Library of Congress, USA)
- Sara Aubry, TBC, (Bibliothèque nationale de France, France)
- Adam Jatowt (Kyoto University, Japan)
- John Kunze (California Digital Library , USA)
- Arturas Mazeika (Max-Planck-Institut Informatik, Germany)
- Frank McCown (Harding University, USA)
- Mark Middleton (Hanzo Archives , UK)
- Michael Nelson (Old Dominion University, USA)
- Kjetil Norvag (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway)
- Philippe Rigaux (Université Paris Dauphine , France)
- Thomas Risse (L3S Research Center, Germany)
- Steven M. Schneider (SUNY Institute of Technology , USA)
- Masashi Toyoda (Tokyo University, Japan)

Call for Articles: Learning Technology Newsletter - Special Issue on Learning Objects and Their Supporting Technologies for Next Generation Learning

Call For Articles - LEARNING TECHNOLOGY NEWSLETTER (ISSN 1438-0625)
publication of IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Learning
Technology (TCLT)
http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/newsletter

SPECIAL ISSUE ON Learning Objects and Their Supporting Technologies for Next
Generation Learning

Guest Editors:
Dr. Vincent Tam and Dr. Edmund Lam
(Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, the University of Hong
Kong)

* Deadline for submission: September 11, 2009

Learning Technology Newsletter aims at publishing and disseminating current research about new and emerging learning technologies as well as their design, usage, application, and evaluation in different contexts of technology enhanced learning.

Learning objects (LOs), as clearly defined by the IEEE 1484 standard, are potentially useful to many innovative applications for next generation learning. In many e-learning applications, LOs can be help to structure the organization of important concepts and their retrieval through indexed terms. To facilitate the explanation of difficult concepts in specific subject area(s), pictures or video files can be flexibly embedded into LOs. However, due to the high complexity of the designed structures adapted for LOs that will simply discourage their reuses, and also the huge costs involved in the re-engineering of existing e-learning platforms and their integration, the possible advantages of LOs and their supporting technologies cannot be fully unveiled in many existing e-learning platforms in the last decade so as to evolve into enabling technologies for next generation learning. Therefore, the challenging issues that need to be addressed in the applications of LOs and their supporting technologies to existing e-learning platforms include, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- prominent techniques/tools that help to make LOs as enabling techniques for next generation learning;
- effective re-engineering methodologies/tools that can facilitate the integration of LOs into existing e-learning systems;
- enabling methodologies/tools that can promote reuses of LOs within the same or across different disciplines;
- distributed processing or mobile computing techniques to facilitate the application or retrieval of LOs in existing e-learning systems;
- intelligent image/video storage and distribution system to facilitate the retrieval of relevant multimedia files embedded in LOs;
- integration of LOs with other interesting e-learning technologies such as game based learning systems.

We invite short articles, case studies, and project reports for October issue. This special issue will be published in Volume 11, Issue 4 (October, 2009).

** The newsletter is of non-refereed nature though the articles will be selected and edited by the Guest Editors. **

* Submission procedure:

1. The articles in the newsletter are limited to 1000 words. Over-length articles will not be published.

2. The manuscripts should be either in Word or RTF format. Any figures used in the contributions would be required separately in a graphic format (gif or jpeg). The figures should also be embedded in the text at appropriate places.

3. Please send the manuscripts by email as attachment to vtam@eee.hku.hk (Subject: Learning Technology October 2009 Submission).

4. In the email, please state clearly that the manuscript is original material that has not been published, and is not being considered forpublication elsewhere.

For further information please see http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/newsletter.

RCIS'2010 - Research Challenges in Information Science

RCIS 2010

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 4th International Conference on
RESEARCH CHALLENGES IN INFORMATION SCIENCE

MAY 19-21, 2010, NICE, FRANCE

Papers submission deadline: November 10, 2009
http://www.farcampus.com/rcis/

SCOPE AND TOPICS:

The Fourth International Conference on RESEARCH CHALLENGES IN INFORMATION SCIENCE (RCIS) aims at providing an international forum for scientists, researchers, engineers and developers from a wide range of information science areas. While presenting research findings and state-of-art solutions, you are especially invited to share experiences on new research challenges in these main topics:

- Databases
- Information Systems
- Web Systems
- Business Process Modelling, Analysis and Design
- Intelligent Agents
- Knowledge Management
- Ontologies
- Knowledge Discovery from Data
- Business applications
- Management applications



Each of these topics areas is expanded on the conference web page (http://www.farcampus.com/rcis/topics.php). Papers may address one or more of the listed sub-topics, although authors should not feel limited by them. Unlisted but related sub-topics are also acceptable, provided they fit in one of the conference main topics.


CONFERENCE PUBLICATIONS AND BEST PAPERS

Papers that have already been accepted or are currently under review for other conferences or journals will not be considered for publications at RCIS’2010. Authors are invited to submit papers in English using the paper format indicated below. Each submitted paper will have to be associated to one of the four following categories.

Technical solution papers present solutions which are novel or significantly improve on existing solutions. A technical solution paper must include a preliminary validation of the proposed solution. Results must be stated clearly enough so that it is possible to validate them in later research.

Evaluation papers evaluate existing problem situations or validate proposed solutions with scientific means, i.e. by empirical studies, experiments, case studies, simulations, mathematical proofs, etc. The research method must be sound and appropriate.

Industrial practice and experience papers present problems or challenges encountered in practice, relate success and failure stories, or report on industrial practice. The practice must be clearly described and its context must be given.

Doctoral Papers are papers submitted by doctoral students (only) and are related to research work in progress.



PAPER SUBMISSION

By submitting a paper, authors implicitly agree that at least one of them will register to the conference and present the paper. Submitted papers will be reviewed by the RCIS’2010 Program Committee based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of exposition. A "blind" paper evaluation method will be used. Therefore authors are kindly requested to produce and provide the full paper, without any reference to the authors.

The manuscript must contain, in its first page, the paper title, the paper category (Technical solution, Evaluation, Industrial or Doctoral), an abstract and a list of keywords but no names or contact details are to be included in any part of the file. Notification of paper acceptance/rejection will be sent by email.

The papers which have been presented by their authors during the conference will be puablished in IEEE RCIS’2010 proceedings.


Paper submissions must be formatted using the IEEE 2-column format (see http://www.ieee.org). They should be limited to a maximum of 12 pages.

All paper submissions will be handled electronically (see //www.farcampus.com/rcis/author.php).



The authors of papers that obtain the highest marks in the reviewing process will be invited to submit an extended version to a journal.



General Chair: Peri Loucopoulos (Loughborough University, UK)

RCIS Steering Committee Chair: Oscar Pastor ( Technical University of Valencia, Spain)

PC Chair: Jean Louis Cavarero (University of Nice, France)

PC Co-Chair: Nadine Tournois (University of Nice, France)

Doctoral papers & Workshop Chair: André Flory (INSA de Lyon, France)

Publicity Chair: Selmin Nurcan (University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France)

Operating Committee Chair: Martine Collard (University of Nice, France)


Program Committee
http://www.farcampus.com/rcis/committee.php


Keynote Speakers:
Brian Fitzgerald (Universiti of Limerick, Ireland)
Colette Rolland (University of Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France)
Roel Wieringa (University of Twente, Netherlands



IMPORTANT DATES:

Papers submission deadline: NOVEMBER 10, 2009

Notification of acceptance and Registration opening: FEBRUARY 1, 2010

RCIS-2010 Conference: MAY 19-21, 2010


Conference contact: rcis@farcampus.com

Job Opening: Researcher and Software Developer (Vienna, Austria)

Position Announcement
RESEARCHER AND SOFTWARE DEVELOPER
PhD Candidate in Collaborative Technologies

The Department of New Media Technology of MODUL University Vienna is seeking an outstanding candidate for joining its research team as a PhD candidate with a special focus on collaborative technologies and Java J2EE enterprise portals. MU Vienna is an international university located on top of Kahlenberg, a scenic hill overlooking the Austrian capital. It combines a strong academic foundation with state-of-the-art curricula and a commitment to innovation and sustainability as key drivers of success in a dynamic and knowledge-based society.

www.modul.ac.at/nmt/researcher

Requirements

* Degree in computer science, information systems or a related area
* Good analytical skills and extensive programming experience, preferably in Java or Python

* Expert knowledge in the following fields:
- J2EE Enterprise Portals (e.g., Liferay)
- Dynamic Web Technologies (AJAX, CSS, etc.)
- Social Collaboration Systems and Web 2.0 Applications

* Optional Qualifications
- Open Source Database Management Systems (PostgreSQL)
- Linux System Administration (Debian)
- Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualization

* Ambition to produce internationally recognized research output, and willingness to collaborate within an interdisciplinary team.

The position remains open until filled with review of resumes to begin August 15, 2009. Additional information on the Department of New Media Technology is available at: www.modul.ac.at/nmt, www.idiom.at, www.geospatialweb.com, and www.ecoresearch.net. MU Vienna is an equal opportunity employer and encourages qualified women to apply. Please send
your application including cover letter, CV and academic transcript to Mag. Gertraud Moser at gertraud.moser@modul.ac.at (preferably as a single PDF file; use www.filemail.com for files exceeding 10 MB).

IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering - Special Issue on Services and Service Based Systems

CALL FOR PAPERS

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Special Issue on
SOFTWARE SERVICES AND SERVICE-BASED SYSTEMS

Guest Editors:
Carlo Ghezzi - Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Klaus Pohl - University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Submission deadline: 01 NOVEMBER 2009
Website: http://www.s-cube-network.eu/tse

TOPICS OF INTEREST

The special issue aims at providing a comprehensive view of the different software engineering approaches investigated by current research on software services and service-based systems. Submitted articles can range from theoretical foundations to empirical studies. In any case, a validation of the proposed approaches is required. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Adaptation and evolution, including human in the loop adaptation and self-adaptation
- Business-process alignment
- Capturing and analyzing context
- Composition and orchestration of software services
- Design and architecture of software services and service-based systems
- Infrastructure and middleware support
- Life-cycle models and processes for service-based systems
- Monitoring, testing and verification of services and service-based systems
- Negotiation and service-level agreements
- Quality assurance of service-based systems
- Requirements engineering for services and service-based systems
- Service quality modelling

BACKGROUND

The service-oriented paradigm is emerging as a new way to engineer systems that are composed of and exposed as services for use through standardized protocols.

Service-based systems are pushing traditional software engineering problems - such as requirements, specification, distribution, componentization, composition, verification, and evolution - to their extreme. Different stakeholders, with diverse and possibly conflicting goals are involved: Clients may use or compose existing services for their own benefit. Service integrators may compose third-party services to provide new, added-value services. Service providers develop, deploy, manage, and evolve software services for a marketplace. When a service is exposed, a specification of its functional and quality properties is made available to allow other parties to search, discover, negotiate, use, and bind them dynamically.

Service-based systems can be seen as a radical evolution from traditional component-based systems. They are made out of services, which are autonomous parts that may evolve at runtime and that are independently conceived and developed by different stakeholders. Service-based systems must be able to cope with this and other kinds of changes such as changes in the requirements, in business processes, in the context or in the services they rely on. Moreover, they should offer a variety of strategies to cope with changes ranging from self-adaptation to human in the loop adaptation

Extreme flexibility and continuous change may conflict with dependability. Most traditional software engineering approaches understand quality assurance as a development-time concern.
Service-based systems require that quality assurance is extended over the entire lifetime of a system, including runtime, when it is operational and providing service. For example, it is necessary to monitor a running system and its context, and check whether it continues to fulfil its
requirements, after an adaptation of the system has occurred or a new or even different service has been included in the system.

SUBMISSIONS

Abstracts should be e-mailed to the guest editors at carlo.ghezzi@polimi.it and klaus.pohl@sse.uni-due.de followed by the online full paper submission at the IEEE TSE submission site (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee) with a note/tag designating the manuscript to this special issue. Submissions must conform to the journal's submission guidelines (http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/peerreviewjournals/author).

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: 01 November 2009
First review results: 31 January 2010
Revisions due: 15 March 2010
Second review results: 15 May 2010
Final version due: 15 June 2010
Publication: Nov/Dec 2010

Assistant Professor in Information Systems, specifically Communications and Collaboration Management

Assistant Professor in Information Systems, specifically Communications and Collaboration Management Application deadline 2009-08-15

Applications are invited for an Assistant Professorship position in Information Systems with a specialization in communications and collaboration management. The successful applicant would be based in the Department of IS of the Muenster School of Business and Economics. Communications and collaboration management studies the impact of communication systems or infrastructures, such as unified or real-time communication or CSCW, in an (inter-)organizational context. Research might focus on emerging practices of communication or collaboration in groups or in social networks.

Assistant Professor (in German: Juniorprofessur W1) is a post that offers an opportunity to qualify for full professorship in the German university system. The appointment is initially for three years with an option of an extension for another three years after successful evaluation.
The teaching load is an equivalent of 4 hours/ per week for the first three years and 5 hours/ per week thereafter. The supervision of PhD candidates is welcomed. The post provides the opportunity to build a research programme. Experience in funded research is valued.

Applicants should have a PhD degree information systems or in management or economics with a specialization in information systems. Further, knowledge is expected in
* organization and management theory,
* social science,
* qualitative research methods.
Applicants should be fluent in English, German language skills are beneficial but not a prerequisite. They should have good collaborative skills and be willing to work in interdisciplinary teams. Further, good communication skills in writing and in presentations are required.

The application shall be written in English and include the following items:
* Description of the applicant's research and pedagogical qualifications, as well as other qualifications;
* Curriculum Vitae (CV);
* Complete list of publications;
* A plan for future work within the area of the announced position, both scientific and educational, if appointed.

The University Muenster is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to raising the ratio of women scientists in senior positions. Consequently, we actively encourage applications from suitably-qualified women who will be treated preferentially. The same applies to suitable
applicants with disabilities.

Applications shall be sent no later then August 15th electronically to:
dekan@wiwi.uni-muenster.de or
to: Prof. Dr. Stefan Klein
Dean Muenster School of Business and Economics Universitaetsstr. 14-16
D-48143 Muenster

Inquiries about the post should sent to Prof. Stefan Klein, mailto:
stefan.klein@uni-muenster.de

Further details about the Münster School of Business and Economics and the
Department of IS can be found at:
http://www1.wiwi.uni-muenster.de/fakultaet/?sprache=eng (school)
http://www1.wiwi.uni-muenster.de/fakultaet/organisation/wirtschaftsinformati
k/ (department) http://www.wi.uni-muenster.de/WI/orga/klein.cfm?status=#status# (research group)

Post-doc position for IR/social networks

The Agency for Science, Technology and Research Singapore is looking for postdoctoral Researcher with experience and interest on social network analysis and information retrieval.
Interest in distributed systems will be an added bonus since the position is in the context of a multi-disciplinary project. Though the candidate is being hired for the mTeam project (http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/anwitaman/Projects.html) s/he will have the opportunity to work closely and interact with researchers involved in the other projects listed in the url.

The salary is negotiable and competitive, commensurate with qualifications and experience.

Interested candidates should send a detailed CV and all enquiries to anwitaman@ntu.edu.sg

Job Openings at KU Leuven

The HMDB research unit (http://www2.cs.kuleuven.be/~hmdb/www/) at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium is looking for new members to join our team!

We invite applications for PhD or post-doctoral positions financed by the European research project ROLE (on Responsive Open Learning environments,http://www.role-project.eu), the network of excellence on Technology Enhanced Learning STELLAR (http://www.stellarnet.eu/) and the Flemish project TermWise (on creating resources for specialised language use).

- The focus of the research of the first open position is on attention metadata: these describe user interactions with a diverse set of applications and web resources. The basic goal is to gather and process attention metadata in unobtrusive ways, so as to better understand and support the actions and goals of the end user across different applications. In a first phase, the research will focus on the domain of technology-enhanced learning. Typical applications would be a personal
or shared dashboard, or a recommender service.

- The focus of the research for the second open position is to develop and validate prototypes of highly responsive technology-enhanced learning environments, offering breakthrough levels of effectiveness, flexibility, user-control and mass-individualization. In this project, we play a significant role in the development of technical specifications that are the basis for enabling the interoperability and personalized mashup of learning services.

- The focus of the PhD research for the third open position is on term alignment, i.e. the automatic alignment of phrases and words that are translational equivalents in large multilingual document collections. The research covers the study of existing statistical alignment models
(e.g., sequence and fertility based models) and the design, development and evaluation of novel alignment algorithms including generative, discriminative and graph models.

- For the last open position, you perform research on international and national projects in collaboration with distinguished international teams. You develop a strong research publication record in proceedings of important conferences and highly ranked journals. You assist in
research funding proposal writing.

Funding is available immediately. The research will be carried out at the Department of Computer Science at the K.U.Leuven, in close collaboration with many of the leading research units on Technology Enhanced Learning in Europe and worldwide.

The candidate has the following profile:

a) A degree in Computer Science, Informatics or equivalent with a minimum grade of cum laude b) Interest in technology enhanced learning and metadata.

Because the successful candidate will work as a member of a project group, team spirit is indispensable.

More information about the financial compensation can be found at http://www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jobsite/verloningspakket.html (Dutch) or http://www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jobsite/welcome.html (English).

Interested applicants should send their CV and letter of application for the first two positions BEFORE AUGUST 20, 2009 to: erik.duval@cs.kuleuven.be and for the last two positions to
sien.moens@cs.kuleuven.be

All inquiries for further information can be sent to the same addresses.

PhD position - 'Social Networks in Research Institutes'

PhD position - 'Social Networks in Research Institutes'

Summary
The Network Institute, one of the VU University of Amsterdam's inter-faculty research institutes, is looking for a PhD student conducting research on the topic of research collaboration within and between research groups from a social network perspective. The study aims to provide a better understanding of the manageability of research in relation to scientific quality, innovation and social relevance. Central questions concern the dynamics of the selection of research projects, exchange of knowledge and the manner in which new product development relates to knowledge and network activity. Research methods employed will be a combination of social network analysis, web and bibliometric analysis and interviews.

Aim
The research is directed at the collection of social network data, bibliometric data and qualitative information on the collaboration between groups in interdisciplinary research institutes. The aim of data collection is to develop a (theoretical) model that can help in the guidance of institutes that contain groups and individuals with heterogeneous disciplinary background and are embedded in research groups. Important is the assessment of the added value of cooperation within and between research groups in reaching scientific and societal outputs.

Elements of the project
- Assess the added value of cooperation in research institutes according to researchers and research group leaders.
- The manner in which the various forms cooperation -- as a consequence of the role of institutes -influence various aspects of output such as publications, applications and patents.
- The manner in which the structure and design of leadership roles in institutes has an effect on lines of inquiry,
- Assessment of the interaction at the individual level in the form of networks, the position of groups vis a vis each other and the embeddedness in the scientific world employing bibliometric methods.
- Dynamics of collaboration in research environments.

Skills and background of PhD student
MSc or MPhilSocial sciences with a demonstrated interest in a selection of science studies, science policy studies, organization and management questions with experience with network research.
MSc in other fields with demonstrated interest in the problem area and acquired skills in social science research.

The student will work in the department of Organization Science and will be supervised by Prof. Dr. Peter van den Besselaar and Prof.dr. P.Groenewegen, in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Prof.dr. J.A. Akkermans in the Faculty of Exact Sciences.

You are invited to send your application, including motivation letter, a curriculum vitae, the list of courses you have followed (with grades) and the names and addresses of two referees before August 9, 2009 to: VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Social Sciences, attn. Mrs. drs. M.
Karssen, Managing director, Metropolitan Building, De Boelelaan 1081-C, NL-1081 HV Amsterdam, or via e-mail: vacature@fsw.vu.nl
Please mention the vacancy number 1.2009.00216 at the top left of the letter and envelope or in the e-mail header.

PROLEARN Academy Newsletter 2009 - Week 30

*** 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


MUPPLE'09 Place: Nice, Date: Sep 29, 2009
2nd Workshop on Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments (MUPPLE'09)

EC-TEL 2009 Date: Sep 29, 2009 - Oct 02, 2009
Fourth European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning "Learning in the Synergy of Multiple Disciplines"

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

*** PROLEARN Academy - Measure
Our auto observation tool for scientific communities contains at present 1594 projects, of which 238 are newsfeeds, 95 newsletters, 533 web sites, 74 mailinglists and 654 blogs. The number of caught entries totals 150176 for the feeds, of which 2347 were retrieved last week. For the newsletters totals 3798 entries, of which 6 were retrieved last week, for the mailinglists there are 106998 entries, of which 299 last week and for the blogs there are 239340 entries, of which 175 last week.


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

We are continuously enlarging our project database.

The 22nd International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'10)

CALL FOR PAPERS CAiSE'10

The 22nd International Conference on Advanced Information
Systems Engineering (CAiSE'10)
7-11 June 2010, Hammamet, Tunisia

http://www.caise2010.rnu.tn

Evolving Information Systems

This year's special theme is "Evolving information systems". Modern information systems are the result of the interconnection of systems of many organizations, are running in variable contexts, and require both a lightweight approach to interoperability and the capability to actively react to changing requirements and failures. In addition, users of information systems are becoming more and more mobile and ubiquitous, requiring the system to adapt to their varying usage contexts and goals. The evolution of an information system should be a continuous process rather than a single step, and it should be inherently supported by the system itself and the design of the information system should consider evolution as an inherent property of the system. The special events and invited speakers of CAiSE '10 will shed light on this theme from various perspectives.

Goal: CAiSE'10 aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in the field of information systems engineering. CAiSE'10 invites submissions on the design, development, maintenance, and usage of information systems - and especially submissions dealing with evolving information systems.

The topics of interests include, but are not restricted to:

Methodologies and approaches for IS engineering
- Enterprise architecture and enterprise modelling
- Requirements engineering
- Business process modelling and management
- Simulation
- Model, component, and software reuse
- IS reengineering
- IS engineering approaches for adaptive and flexible information systems
- Service science
- Knowledge patterns and ontologies for IS engineering
- IS in networked & virtual organizations
- Method engineering

Innovative platforms, architectures and technologies for IS engineering
- Service-oriented architecture
- Model-driven architecture
- Component based development
- Agent architecture
- Distributed, mobile, and open architecture
- Innovative database technology
- Semantic web
- IS and ubiquitous technologies
- adaptive and context-aware IS

Engineering of specific kinds of IS:
- eGovernment
- Enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, CRM)
- Data warehousing
- Workflow systems
- Knowledge management systems
- Content management systems

Quality concerns in IS engineering
- Knowledge, information, and data quality
- Quality of models and their languages
- Usability, security, trust, flexibility, interoperability

Important Dates:

Oct. 12, 2009: Tutorials & workshops submission deadline
Nov. 30, 2009: Paper submission deadline

Feb. 8, 2010: Notification of acceptance June 7-11, 2010: Conference & workshops

Types of contributions: we invite four types of original and scientific papers:

1. Formal and/or technical papers describe original solutions (theoretical, methodological or conceptual) in the field of IS engineering. A technical paper should clearly describe the situation or problem tackled, the relevant state of the art, the position or solution suggested and the potential - or, even better, the evaluated - benefits of the contribution.

2. Empirical evaluation papers evaluate existing problem situations or validate proposed solutions with scientific means, i.e. by empirical studies, experiments, case studies, simulations, formal analyses, mathematical proofs, etc. Scientific reflection on problems and practices in industry also falls into this category.
The topic of the evaluation presented in the paper as well as its causal or logical properties must be clearly stated. The research method must be sound and appropriate.

3. Experience papers present problems or challenges encountered in practice, relate success and failure stories, or report on industrial practice. The focus is on 'what' and on lessons learned, not on an in-depth analysis of 'why'. The practice must be clearly described and its context must be given. Readers should be able to draw conclusions for their own practice.

4. Exploratory Papers can describe completely new research positions or approaches, in order to face to a generic situation arising because of new ICT tools or new kinds of activities or new IS challenges. They must describe precisely the situation and demonstrate how current methods, tools, ways of reasoning, or meta-models are inadequate. They must rigorously present their approach and demonstrate its pertinence and correctness to addressing the identified situation.

Submission Conditions: Papers should be submitted in PDF format. The results described must be unpublished and must not be under review elsewhere. Submissions´must conform to Springer's LNCS format and should not exceed 15 pages, including all text, figures, references and appendices. Submissions not conforming to the LNCS format, exceeding 15 pages, or being obviously out of the scope of the conference, will be rejected without review. Information about the Springer LNCS format can be found at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. Three to five keywords characterising the paper should be indicated at the end of the abstract. The type of paper (technical/empirical evaluation/experience/exploratory paper) should be indicated in the submission.

Publication: Accepted papers will be presented at CAiSE'10 and published in the
conference proceedings, which is published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

Advisory Committee
Arne Solvberg, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Janis Bubenko Jr, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Colette Rolland, University of Paris 1 - Pantheon - Sorbonne, France

General CoChairs
Colette Rolland, University of Paris 1 - Pantheon - Sorbonne, France
Henda Ben Ghezala, ENSI, Tunisia

Program Chair
Barbara Pernici, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Organisation Chair
Naoufel Kraiem, ENSI, Tunisia

Workshop and tutorial
Pierluigi Plebani, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Jolita Ralyte', University of Geneva, Switzerland

Forum chairs
Pnina Soffer, University of Haifa, Israel
Erik Proper, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

DC co-chairs
Boualem Banatallah, University of New South Wales, Australia
Anne Persson, University of Skövde, Sweden

Publicity co-chairs
Lida Xu, Old Dominion University, USA
Selmin Nuncan, University Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France

Publication co-chairs
Cinzia Cappiello, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Motoshi Saeki, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan

Finance Chair
Yassine Jamoussi, ENSI, Tunisia

Local Arrangements
Malek Ghenima, Tunisia

Website
Jamil Dimassi, Tunisia

PROGRAM BOARD

Hans Akkermans, NL
Sjaak Brinkkemper, NL
Valeria De Antonellis, Italy
Eric Dubois, Luxembourg
Marlon Dumas, Estonia
Pericles Loucopoulos, UK
Moira Norrie. Switzerland
Antoni Olive, Spain
Andreas Opdahl, Norway
Oscar Pastor Lopez, Spain
Anne Persson, Sweden
Klaus Pohl, Germany
Pnina Soffer, Israel

Program Committee

Wil van der Aalst (The Netherlands)
Pär Ågerfalk (Sweden)
Antonia Albani (The Netherlands)
Marco Bajec (Slovenia)
Luciano Baresi (Italy)
Zorah Bellahsene (France)
Boalem Benatallah (Australia)
Giuseppe Berio (France)
Claudio Bettini (Italy)
Rafik Bouaziz (Tunisia)
Nacer Boudjlida (France)
Mokrane Bouzeghoub (France)
Fabio Casati (Italy)
Silvana Castano (Italy)
Jaelson Castro (Brazil)
Corine Cauvet (France)
João Falcão e Cunha (Portugal)
Joerg Evermann (Canada)
Xavier Franch (Spain)
Mariagrazia Fugini (Italy)
Claude Godart (France)
Mohand-Said Hacid (France)
Terry Halpin (Australia)
Brian Henderson-Sellers (Australia)
Willem-Jan Van den Heuvel (The Netherlands)
Patrick Heymans (Belgium)
Yassine Jamoussi (Tunisia)
Matthias Jarke (Germany)
Paul Johannesson (Sweden)
M�rīte Kirikova (Latvia)
Naoufel Kraiem (Tunisia)
John Krogstie (Norway)
Wilfried Lemahieu (Belgium)
Michel Leonard (Switzerland)
Kalle Lyytinen (USA)
Raimundas Matulevicious (Belgium)
Andrea Maurino (Italy)
Jan Mendling (Germany)
Isabelle Mirbel (France)
Haris Mouratidis (UK)
John Mylopoulos (Canada)
Selmin Nuncan (France)
Andreas Oberweis (Germany)
Jeffrey Parsons (Canada)
Mike Papazoglou (The Netherlands)
Michael Petit (Belgium)
Yves Pigneur (Switzerland)
Geert Poels (Belgium)
Erik Proper (The Netherlands)
Jolita Ralyte (Switzerland)
Manfred Reichert (Germany)
Mark Roantree (Ireland)
Michael Rosemann (Australia)
Gustavo Rossi (Argentina)
Matti Rossi (Finland)
Motoshi Saeki (Japan)
Camille Salinesi (France)
Keng Siau (USA)
Monique Snoeck (Belgium)
Janis Stirna (Sweden)
Arnon Sturm (Israel)
Stefan Tai (Germany)
David Taniar (Australia)
Ernest Teniente (Spain)
Bernhard Thalheim (Germany)
Farouk Toumani (France)
Aphrodite Tsalgatidou (Greece)
Jean Vanderdonckt (Belgium)
Irene Vanderfeesten (The Netherlands)
Olegas Vasilecas (Lituania)
Yair Wand (Canada)
Mathias Weske (Germany)
Hans Weigand (The Netherlands)
Roel Wieringa (The Netherlands)
Carson Woo (Canada)
Eric Yu (Canada)
Didar Zowghi (Australia)

Job Opening: Postdoctoral Researcher in Semantic Information Mining

Postdoctoral Researcher in Semantic Information Mining
Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI),
National University Of Ireland, Galway
Ref. No. NUIG-057-09

The DERI Semantic Information Mining stream (http://sim.deri.ie/) invites applications for a postdoctoral position on mining organisational structure (expertise, communities, etc.) from
organisation-specific textual and semi-structured data sets and social and collaborative interactions.

Candidates should have a PhD degree in a relevant field of study, e.g. computer science, natural language processing, data mining, machine learning, etc. with an emphasis on areas such as text & web mining and semantic analysis. 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. The position is for a fixed period
of 18 months with the possibility of extension, depending on successful acquisition of project funding in which the selected candidate will be expected to actively participate.

Essential skills:
- A PhD, typically in a computing-related discipline, with a strong empirical and analytical component
- A PhD with substantial components in natural language processing, machine learning and data mining
- Research experience in the analysis of large text collections such as digital libraries, web corpora, etc.
- An ability to develop and manage their own research agenda
- An ability to work in an interdisciplinary team
- Good interpersonal skills and a commitment to working collaboratively
in a research team and delivering on team goals

Desirable skills:
- A record of published research in areas such as contextualized and personalized search
- Familiarity with current research on Social Network Analysis and´Semantic Web
- Experience in developing an effective working relationship with researchers from other disciplines and industrial collaborators
- Experience in the preparation of research grant proposals
- Experience in the development of research software
- Some experience assisting in the supervision of research students

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, close collaboration with industrial partners and up-to-date infrastructure and resources. The DERI Semantic Information Mining stream is a collaboration between the DERI units for Natural Language Processing (http://nlp.deri.ie/) and Information Mining and Retrieval (http://uimr.deri.ie/). The DERI Unit for Natural Language Processing has a focus on applied research in ontology-based information extraction, semantic-level text mining and the use of linguistic and semantic methods in information retrieval. UNLP develops methods for the efficient application of NLP tools in combination with domain semantics as specified in ontologies, thesauri and other knowledge organisation systems for relevant use cases. The DERI Unit for Information Mining and Retrieval focuses on methods to harness the massive amounts of dynamically-produced, semi-structured data produced by Web communities. UIMR examines techniques for the selection and combination of features in collaborative information spaces. Another focus is the analysis and modelling of the dynamics of online communities in order to understand the structures and behaviours which underlie topic development and diffusion. Applications of this work lie in the development of richer personalisation, filtering and recommendation techniques using user preferences, constraints and context, content analysis, content semantics and collaborative and social relationships.

Salary range: €40,578 - €49,341 per annum, (commensurate with qualifications and experience)

For informal enquiries about this post please contact Dr. Paul Buitelaar
(paul.buitelaar@deri.org) and/or Dr. Conor Hayes (conor.hayes@deri.org)

To apply:
Interested candidates should send a detailed CV with cover letter, names and addresses of at least three and not more than five referees, and a statement of research interests, summarising how their experience and expertise will contribute to a research program in semantic information
mining. Applications may be sent via e-mail (in PDF only) to paul.buitelaar@deri.org
Please put ref.no. NUIG-057-09 in subject line of e-mail application.

Closing date for receipt of applications is 5pm on Monday September 14th 2009.

National University of Ireland, Galway is an equal opportunity employer.

PhD position in Federated Sensor Networks at the University of Oxford

PhD position in Federated Sensor Networks at the University of Oxford

How to apply:

The deadline for receipt of applications is 15th September 2009.

In the first instance you should email a copy of your c.v. and a statement
of your research interests to niki.trigoni@comlab.ox.ac.uk and
Julie.sheppard@comlab.ox.ac.uk

We will then advise you whether you should complete an application form and
how to do so.

All formal applications are subject to a £25 application fee.

If you have any questions about the applications procedure please email
Julie@comlab.ox.ac.uk

Further information:

Wireless sensor networks are more and more seen as a solution to large-scale tracking and monitoring applications. The deployment and management of these networks, however, is usually handled by a single controlling entity (i.e., owner). Furthermore, a sensor network is often dedicated to a single application. This is due to the fact that we do not yet have the means to deal with a secure multi-purpose federated sensor network, involving tens of thousands of sensor nodes running different applications in parallel and able to reconfigure dynamically to run others. Depending on the query load, the priority and urgency of each application, sensing, bandwidth and computation resources must be carefully allocated to provide desirable
quality-of-service, whilst preserving fairness, secure operation and privacy across applications.

The objectives of the DPhil project at Oxford are to:

* Develop distributed algorithms for processing multiple queries with very different quality-of- service requirements for accuracy and delay. In the presence of high query loads and limited network resources, these algorithms should gracefully degrade the quality of query answers giving priority to addressing the needs of critical applications.
* Study the tradeoff between data quality and reduced resource usage in evaluating multiple declarative queries in a federated sensor network.
* Implement and test query processing algorithms in synthetic and real deployments of federated sensor networks.

It is anticipated that the students will carry out a substantial part of the implementation on real sensor nodes, and so will need to have strong coding and practical skills. The students will be trained to organize experiments, analyze results and write papers.

Further information on OUCL can be obtained from http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/ and informal queries about the project can be sent to Niki.Trigoni@comlab.ox.ac.uk

Postdoc opportunity in Mobile System Measurement and Quality of Experience

The Mobile Technology Centre (MobiTeC) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) invites applications for a full-time Postdoctoral Researcher in the area of Mobile System Measurement and Quality of Experience (QoE) for Multimedia services.

The candidate should have a Ph.D. degree (or close to graduation), and must have a strong research record in ONE or more of the following areas demonstrated through publications in competitive conferences and/or journals:

i. Multimedia quality assessment, objective visual/auditory user experience metrics
ii. Data-stream mining and time-series analysis
iii. Empirical wireless systems/network performance measurements

The candidate is expected to be a team member of a Mobile QoE research project.
The position is available immediately for an initial duration of 12 months, with possibility for extension upon mutual agreement.

Interested candidates should send their CV to Prof. Wing C. Lau, wclau@ie.cuhk.edu.hk

Assistant Professor in New Media Technology - MU Vienna, Austria

Faculty Position Announcement
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGY

Semantic Web, Social Media, Future Internet Technology
Information Retrieval and Visualization

www.modul.ac.at/nmt/assistant-professor

The Department of New Media Technology of MODUL University Vienna is seeking an outstanding candidate for joining the faculty as an Assistant Professor of New Media Technology. MU Vienna is an international university located on top of Kahlenberg, a scenic hill overlooking the Austrian capital. It combines a strong academic foundation with state-of-the-art curricula and a commitment to innovation and sustainability as key drivers of success in a dynamic and knowledge-based society. The appointee will teach units within the MBA in New Media Technology and Management program and is expected to make significant contributions to the department's research portfolio.

Requirements

* Doctoral degree in computer science, management information systems, or a related area (we also welcome applicants about to finish their thesis).

* Strong track record and research interest in one or more of the following fields:

- SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGY
- SOCIAL MEDIA, WEB 2.0, VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES
- INFORMATION RETRIEVAL AND TEXT MINING
- MACHINE LEARNING AND ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS
- INFORMATION VISUALIZATION

* Outstanding teaching skills and the ability to relate to students; excellent written and spoken English (given the university's international orientation, German is not a requirement and English native speakers are encouraged to apply).

* Ambition to produce internationally recognized research output, and willingness to collaborate within an interdisciplinary team. Experience in preparing research grant proposals on the national or European level, as well as in managing and supervising large software development projects.

The position is available from September 2009 onwards (EUR 55,000 per annum; additional allowances are available). Detailed information on the Department of New Media Technology and its activities can be found at: www.modul.ac.at/nmt, www.idiom.at, www.geospatialweb.com, and
www.ecoresearch.net. MU Vienna is an equal opportunity employer and strongly encourages qualified women to apply. Please send your application including cover letter, curriculum vitae and list of publications to Mag. Gertraud Moser at gertraud.moser@modul.ac.at (preferably as a single PDF file; use www.filemail.com for files exceeding 10 MB). The position remains open until
filled with review of resumes to begin August 1, 2009.

SPRINGL 09 - 2nd ACM International Workshop on Security and Privacy in GIS and LBS

SPRINGL'09 - 2nd ACM International Workshop on Security and Privacy in GIS and LBS

Co-located with 17th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on
Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS 2009)

November 3, 2009, Seattle, WA, USA

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/daic/springl09

CALL FOR RESEARCH PAPERS

Our society is witnessing a dramatic increase in geospatial data infrastructures, data products, and services, many of them playing a key role in decision making in organizations. There are currently major national and international efforts in the coordinated development, use,
sharing, and dissemination of geospatial data in several application contexts including homeland security, environmental crises, and natural and industrial disasters. Geospatial infrastructures are being leveraged by companies to provide a large variety of location-based services (LBS) able to tailor services to users. However, despite the increase of publicly accessible geospatial information only little attention is being paid on how to secure geospatial information systems (GIS) and LBS. Privacy is also of increasing concern given the sensitivity of personally-identifiable location information. This is despite major advancements that have been made in secure computing infrastructures and the secure and privacy-preserving management of traditional (relational) data in particular. Given these pressing needs for securing GIS and LBS as well as assuring privacy, it is compelling to investigate security and privacy aspects as they relate to the management of geospatial data and the development of both emerging LBS and mission-critical geographic applications.

SPRINGL 2009 is the second workshop in the SPRINGL workshop series that aims at bringing together researchers working on the foundations of the field and on novel applications bridging spatio-temporal data management and security and privacy.

TOPICS:

We encourage both researchers and practitioners to participate and submit papers on topics including, but not limited to the following:

Access control for spatio-temporal databases
Access control for moving object databases
Administration of security and privacy policies
Anonymization techniques for LBS
Application of encryption techniques to LBS
Convergence of physical and logical security
Context-aware access control
Context-aware digital identity management
Context-aware location privacy
Digital rights management for geospatial data
High assurance integrity for geospatial data
Information hiding in geospatial data
Location and movement-aware security
Mobile identities
Obfuscation of sensitive geospatial information
Privacy ontology
Privacy-preserving analysis of spatio-temporal data
Security and privacy policies for geo-social networks
Secure localization
Secure outsourcing of geospatial data
Security and privacy for RFID systems
Security and privacy for streaming data
Security for spatial data infrastructures (SDI)
Service-based access control to geospatial data
Usability of security and privacy services for LBS
Usage control for LBS and mobile users

IMPORTANT DATES:

Paper submissions due: July 24, 2009
Notification to the authors: September 14, 2009
Camera ready papers due: September 28, 2009
ACM GIS 2009 Conference: November 4-6, 2009
SPRINGL Workshop: November 3, 2009

WORKSHOP ORGANIZATION:

General Chair:
Elisa Bertino, Purdue University, USA

Program Co-chairs:
Maria Luisa Damiani, University of Milan, Italy
Y?cel Saygin, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey

Web Site Chair:
Chenyun Dai, Purdue University, USA

Proceedings Editor:
Ashish Kamra, Purdue University, USA

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

Gail-Joon Ahn, Arizona State University, USA
Walid G. Aref, Purdue University, USA
Rafae Bhatti, Oracle, USA
Patrick Capolsini, Universit?de la Polyn?sie Fran?aise
Reynold Cheng, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Isabel Cruz, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA
Josep Domingo-Ferrer, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Catalonia, Spain
Panos Kalnis, KAUST, Saudi Arabia
Paul El Khoury, SAP Research, France
Michael Gertz, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Gabriel Ghinita, Purdue University, USA
James Joshi, University of Pittsburgh, USA
Fosca Giannotti, ISTI-CNR, Italy
Dan Lin, Missouri University of Science and Technology, USA
Ling Liu, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Jorge Lobo, IBM, USA
Herv'Martin, University of Grenoble, France
Mohamed Mokbel, University of Minnesota, USA
Cyrus Shahabi, University of Southern California, USA
Bhavani Thuraisngham, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Kenji Takahashi, NTT, Japan
Tiancheng Li, Purdue University, USA
Vicent Torra, IIIA-CSIC, Catalonia, Spain

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:

Submitted papers must not substantially overlap with papers that have been published or that are simultaneously submitted to a journal or a conference with proceedings. Submitted papers can be of two types:
- Regular Research Papers: these papers should report original research results or significant case studies. They should be at most 10 pages.
- Position Papers: these papers should report novel research directions or identify challenging problems. They should be at most 5 pages.

Each submission should start with: the title, abstract, and names, contact information of authors, type of the submission (research paper or position paper). Papers should use at least 11-point font and reasonable margins on A4 or US letter-size paper (8.5 inch x 11 inch). Papers must be electronically submitted in PDF format at the following address:http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=springl09. Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their paper will
be presented at the workshop. The workshop proceedings will also be part of the ACM Digital Library.

A special issue including the best workshop papers will be organized for publication in the Transactions on Data Privacy (http://www.tdp.cat/).

Post-doctoral Research Fellowship: personalized educational resources

Post-doctoral Research Fellowship
Graduate Institute of Network Learning Technology
National Central University, Taiwan

Applications are invited for two post-doctoral positions to work on an interdisciplinary project. The project aims to develop personalised educational resources that can accommodate learners
individual differences. The work will involve both system development and empirical studies. The candidate must have an PhD degree in computer science, information science or a related discipline. Knowledge of programming in the Internet and data mining is essential and experience in developing software for personalised applications is also desirable.

The post will begin on 1 October or as soon as possible thereafter. Informal inquiries may be made to Dr. Sherry Chen (lip96yc@gmail.com). Please also send your application to Dr. Sherry
Chen (lip96yc@gmail.com).

Closing date for applications is: 1st September 2009.

PhD Opportunity, Query Processing and Optimization, IRIT Lab., Toulouse, France

The pyramid team of the IRIT laboratory (http://www.irit.fr/, Toulouse, France) has a research stipend (scholarship) for a Ph.D. student beginning October 2009, to work on the following theme: Query Processing in Large Scale Environments.

Location : IRIT, Paul Sabatier University, Toulouse, France
Team Pyramide: http://www.irit.fr/-Equipe-PYRAMIDE-
Advisor : Abdelkader Hameurlain, <hameur@irit.fr>

Program : ARPEGE (ANR 2009)
PAIRSE Project : Preserving Privacies in P2P environments: A Web Service-based Approach
Consortium : LIRIS, IRIT, Telecom Institut, Semsoft, Swid, MTIC

Starting : Octobrer 2009
Duration: 3 years
Funding: ~ 1330 Euro net per month

Description & Objectives

Since ten years, the grid and perr-to-peer P2P systems are hot research topics. Recently, the grid systems open towards the management of heterogeneous and distributed data on a large-scale environment. The Grid or P2P data management raises new problems and presents real challenges: resource discovery and selection, query optimization, cost models, monitoring, replication, autonomic data management, security issues....
The main characteristics of these systems are: large scale (e.g. high numbers of data sources, users, and computing resources) and dynamicity of nodes (unstable system). The synergy and convergence of interests between grid, P2P and agent systems have been clearly pointed out. So, mainly, P2P techniques and agent systems are often used in resource discivery process.
In this context, a promising approach consists in integrating and efficiently exploiting mobile agent paradigm in distributed query processing and dynamic optimization. More precisely, the objectives of this PhD Thesis consists in :

1. providing a survey and a qualitative comparison of existent and promising approaches and methods for resource discovery,
2. choosing an approach and proposing a viable resource discovery method,
3. defining an adaptable and efficient execution model for distributed query optimization base on mobile agents in order to bring scaling and decentralized control,
4. developing an experimental platform in order to validate and evaluate performance of proposed methods.

A target application is efficiently querying biomedical data integration systems where data sources are heterogeneous and distributed on large scale environments.

Required knowledges and skills :

- In depth knowledge in databases including following topics : query optimization, and cost models
- knowledge on Grid and P2P systems.

Application:
Interested candidates are invited to send an application (CV, academic record, motivational and recommendation letters) by email to hameur@irit.fr and morvan@irit.

Applications should be received before September 20th, 2009.

MIR 2010 - International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval

ACM SIGMM International Conference on

Multimedia Information Retrieval
(http://riemann.ist.psu.edu/mir2010)

ACM MIR-2010
Call for Papers

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
March 29-31, 2010

Call for Papers

http://riemann.ist.psu.edu/mir2010/cfp.pdf

Multimedia information retrieval is a cross-cutting field. Extending beyond the borders of culture, art, and science, the search for digital information is one of the major challenges of our time. Digital libraries, bio-computing & medical science, the Internet and social networking sites,
streaming video, multimedia databases, cultural heritage collections and P2P networks have created a worldwide need for new paradigms and techniques on how to browse, search and summarize multimedia collections and more generally how to afford efficient multimedia content consumption.

The 11th ACM International Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval (MIR) is the premier scientific meeting for discussing the latest advances in the area of multimedia retrieval. MIR 2010 is on its second year as a full ACM conference, following nine successful years as a workshop held in conjunction with the ACM Multimedia Conference. The growth of MIR is a
result the growing importance of multimedia content in our lives. In MIR 2008, there were 308 submitted papers with an overall (full and short papers) acceptance rate of 18%. The conference was attended by more than 150 registered participants.

The purpose of MIR 2010 is to bring together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry. We are soliciting original papers that address a wide range of issues in multimedia information exploration, summarization and retrieval including, but not limited to:

-- Analysis, Indexing, Search and Retrieval of multimedia data: images, video, audio, music, other data types, multi-modal systems
-- Personal Multimedia Management: analysis, search, retrieval, summarization
-- Novel Interfaces for multimedia management, search and retrieval
-- Digital Life Experience analysis and retrieval - life logs, digital immortality, life bits Video surveillance browsing and retrieval,
-- Exploration of media archives: browsing, experiential computig Interfaces and User Experience for multimedia exploration, visualization,
-- Learning, personalization and relevance feedback in multimedia retrieval
-- Context and content-based approaches to multimedia retrieval
-- Mobile multimedia indexing, search and retrieval applications
-- Preserving cultural heritage,
-- Trademark search, multimedia copy detection, multimedia watermarking
techniques
-- Multimedia Data Mining
-- Scientific multimedia, environmental studies, bio-computing and medical multimedia analysis and indexing (MRI/CT, microscopic images, satellite imaging, sensors, etc.)

Special Sessions
-------------------
Special Sessions for emerging frontier theories or applications in MIR. Note that the novelty requirement in these sessions is much higher than the regular paper submissions. Information about these sessions will be available on the conference Website.

Paper Submission
---------------------
Full papers (10 pages in the ACM style sheet in English) should be submitted through the website submission system. Each author can be involved in at most two submissions to this conference. The authors may choose to submit manuscripts for double-blind review. If that is the case, we recommend that the authors not give any indications of authorship in the text.

General Chairs
------------------
James Z. Wang (Penn State University, jwang@psu.edu)
Nozha Boujemaa (INRIA, France, Nozha.Boujemaa@inria.fr)

Technical Program Co-Chairs
----------------------------------
Nuria Oliver (Telefonica Research, Spain, nuriao@tid.es)
(another co-chair to be named)

Important Dates
--------------------
September 15, 2009 Paper Submission
November 20, 2009 Acceptance Notification
December 15, 2009 Camera Ready Papers Due

PROLEARN Academy Newsletter 2009 - Week 29

*** 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

*** New Call For Papers

IADIS WWW/Internet 2009 Conference
Call-Art: Conference, Paper submission deadline: Jul 31, 2009
The IADIS WWW/Internet 2009 conference aims to address the main issues of concern within WWW/Internet. WWW and Internet had a huge development in recent years. Aspects of concern are no longer just technical anymore but other aspects have aroused. This conference aims to cover both technological as well as non-technological issues related to these developments. Main tracks have been identified (see below). However innovative contributes that don't fit into these areas will also be considered since they might be of benefit to conference attendees.

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

*** PROLEARN Academy - Measure
Our auto observation tool for scientific communities contains at present 1594 projects, of which 238 are newsfeeds, 95 newsletters, 533 web sites, 74 mailinglists and 654 blogs. The number of caught entries totals 148343 for the feeds, of which 2482 were retrieved last week. For the newsletters totals 3789 entries, of which 12 were retrieved last week, for the mailinglists there are 106661 entries, of which 234 last week and for the blogs there are 238704 entries, of which 216 last week.


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

We are continuously enlarging our project database.

Extended Deadline: 4th International Workshop on Multimedia Technologies for E-Learning (MTEL)

The Fourth IEEE International Workshop
on Multimedia Technologies for E-Learning (MTEL)

in conjunction with the IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia
2009 (ISM09)

December 14-16, 2009, San Diego, USA

http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~knipping/ieee/ism09-mtel/

Extended Call for Papers

Due to its potential to make learning easier, more convenient, and more effective, education is one of the preeminent areas of applications for multimedia. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers who are interested in the intersection area between the technological point of view and the human-centered view of multimedia technologies for E-Learning.

The workshop topics include but are not limited to:
- Automated lecture recording and presentation techniques
- Automated lecture analysis and indexing
- Classroom note taking and whiteboard capturing and analysis
- Automated analysis of learning and teaching interactions
- Repositories for multimedia education
- Multimedia information retrieval for educational use
- Intelligent searching and navigation in elearning portals
- Interactive computer-based training
- Simulations, animations, and virtual laboratories in teaching
- Virtual reality and augmented reality in education
- Multimedia authoring software for e-learning
- Implicit and explicit learner feedback
- User Tracking
- Quality measures and assessment of multimedia education
- Community efforts aiming at cross-university reuse of web lectures
- Technical infrastructures for large scale web lecture repositories

Workshop Proceedings

The workshop solicits regular technical papers of up to 6 pages (IEEE double-column format). Workshop papers will be official publications of IEEE which will be included in IEEEXplore and also be available as printed workshop proceedings. A number of selected papers will be
invited for extension and publication in a special issue of ITSE (International Journal of Interactive Technology and Smart Education) published by Emerald.

Submission Details

Papers must be original and not submitted to or accepted by any other conference or journal. Papers should be submitted in electronic form as PDF file to the organizers. Submissions must be formatted according to the 8.5x11 inch double column IEEE CS proceedings format and must not
exceed 6 pages.

Important Dates

Submission due: July 26, 2009
Notification: August 30, 2009
Camera-Ready due: September 20, 2009

Co-Chairs
OLIVER BRDICZKA, Palo Alto Research Center
LARS KNIPPING, Berlin Inst. of Technology
NADINE LUDWIG, Berlin Inst. of Technology
ROBERT MERTENS, Fraunhofer IAIS

Advisory Chair
GERALD FRIEDLAND, ICSI Berkeley

Program Committee
HELMAR BURKHART, Univ. of Basel
PAUL DICKSON, Univ. of Massachusetts
SABINA JESCHKE, RWTH Aachen Univ.
WOLFGANG HÜRST, Utrecht Univ.
MARKUS KETTERL, Univ. of Osnabrück
ULRICH KORTENKAMP, Univ. of Education Karlsruhe
FLEMING LAMPI, Kavisio
YING LI, IBM TJ Watson Research Center
THOMAS RICHTER, Univ. of Stuttgart
JOCHEN SCHWENNIGER, Fraunhofer IAIS
JÜRGEN STEIMLE, Darmstadt Inst. of Technology
GEORG TURBAN, Darmstadt Inst. of Technology
DOMINIQUE VAUFREYDAZ, Univ. Pierre-Mendès
HEINZ-DIETRICH WUTTKE, Ilmenau Inst. of Technology
PETER ZIEWER, Munich Inst. of Technology

he latest Issue of IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies (Vol. 2 No. 2) is online

This is to notify you that the http://opac.ieeecomputersociety.org/opac?year=2009&volume=2&issue=2&acronym=tlt April-June 2009 (Vol. 2, No. 2) issue of http://www.computer.org/tlt IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies is now online. You can access any of the following articles and columns individually from the table of contents, or you can http://csdl.computer.org/dl/trans/lt/2009/02/tlt200902.zip?login=true download
the entire issue as a zip file (8.913 MB). To login, please click the text link "Register/Login," located in the blue bar at the top of the page.

To access the articles in this issue, use your IEEE user name and password at http://opac.ieeecomputersociety.org/opac?year=2009&volume=2&issue=2&acronym
=tlt

For information on using your account, visit the IEEE at
http://www.ieee.org/web/accounts/ http://www.ieee.org/web/accounts/. If you need information on your subscription or have membership questions, please email mailto:help@computer.org

Upcoming Special Sections: Open Educational Resources-Learning Objects,

The Many Faces of Remote Laboratories in Engineering Education, and Mobile and Ubiquitous Technologies for Learning

EDITORIAL

Introduction to the Special Issue on Real World Applications of Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Carlos Ramos, Claude Frasson, Sowmya Ramachandran
<http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.26>http://doi.ieeecompu
tersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.26

PAPERS

Scaling Up Programming by Demonstration for Intelligent Tutoring Systems Development: An Open-Access Web Site for Middle School Mathematics Learning Vincent Aleven, Bruce M. McLaren, Jonathan Sewall

<http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.22>http://doi.ieeecompu
tersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.22

Abstract:
Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), which provide step-by-step guidance to students in complex problem-solving activities, have been shown to enhance student learning in a range of domains. However, they tend to be difficult to build. Our project investigates whether the process of authoring an ITS can be simplified, while at the same time maintaining the characteristics that make ITS effective, and also maintaining the ability to support large-scale tutor development. Specifically, our project tests whether authoring tools based on programming-by-demonstration techniques (developed in prior research) can support the development of a large-scale, real-world tutor. We are creating an open-access Web site, called Mathtutor (<http://webmathtutor.org/>http://webmathtutor.org), where middle school students can solve math problems with step-by-step guidance from ITS. The Mathtutor site fields example-tracing tutors, a novel type of ITS that are built "by demonstration,² without programming, using the Cognitive Tutor Authoring Tools (CTATs). The project's main contribution will be that it represents a stringent test of large-scale tutor authoring through programming by demonstration. A secondary contribution will be that it tests whether an open-access site (i.e., a site that is widely and freely available) with software tutors for math learning can attract and sustain user interest and learning on a large scale.

Using Mixed-Effects Modeling to Analyze Different Grain-Sized Skill Models in an Intelligent Tutoring System
Mingyu Feng, Neil T. Heffernan, Cristina Heffernan, Murali Mani
<http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.17>http://doi.ieeecompu
tersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.17

Abstract:
Student modeling and cognitive diagnostic assessment are important issues that need to be addressed for the development and successful application of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS). ITS needs the construction of complex models to represent the skills that students are using and their knowledge states, and practitioners want cognitively diagnostic information at a finer grained level. Traditionally, most assessments treat all questions on the test as sampling a single underlying knowledge component. Can we have our cake and eat it, too? That is, can we have a good overall prediction of a high stakes test, while at the same time be able to tell teachers meaningful information about fine-grained knowledge components? In this paper, we introduce an online intelligent tutoring system that has been widely used. We then present some encouraging results about a fine-grained skill model with the system that is able to predict state test scores. This model allows the system track about 106 knowledge components for eighth grade math. In total, 921 eighth grade students were involved in the study. We show that our fine-grained model could improve prediction compared to other coarser grained models and an IRT-based model. We conclude that this intelligent tutoring system can be a good predictor of performance.

Interactive Problem Solving Support in the Adaptive Educational Hypermedia System MATHEMA
Alexandros Papadimitriou, Maria Grigoriadou, Georgios Gyftodimos
<http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.19>http://doi.ieeecompu
tersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.19

Abstract:
This paper describes the interactive problem solving support offered by our adaptive educational hypermedia system called MATHEMA. The general goal of the MATHEMA is the support of senior high school students or the beginners of higher education, through an interactive and constructivist environment, in learning physics (electromagnetism) individually and/or collaboratively, and to overcome their possible misconceptions and learning difficulties. Initially, a review of related work about the implemented AEHS/ITS and the didactic design principles of the MATHEMA are presented. Through the interactive problem solving, the system supports the students in solving electromagnetism problems, individually and/or collaboratively, by following an activity that is based on the experimentation with simulations, explorations, guided discovery, and collaboration didactic approaches. An experimental study with senior high school students showed that they improve their performances when following this activity. A questionnaire that we gave to the students to express their opinion about our system helped us to improve the quality of the courses.

Supporting Computer Science Curriculum: Exploring and Learning Linked Lists with iList
Davide Fossati, Barbara Di Eugenio, Christopher W. Brown, Stellan
Ohlsson, David G. Cosejo, Lin Chen
<http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.21>http://doi.ieeecompu
tersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.21

Abstract:
We developed two versions of a system, called iList, that helps students learn linked lists, an important topic in computer science curricula. The two versions of iList differ on the level of feedback they can provide to the students, specifically in the explanation of syntax and execution errors. The system has been fielded in multiple classrooms in two institutions. Our results indicate that iList is effective, is considered interesting and useful by the students, and its performance is getting closer to the performance of human tutors. Moreover, the system is being developed in the context of a study of human tutoring, which is guiding the evolution of iList with empirical evidence of effective tutoring.

Increasing Parental Self-Efficacy in a Home-Tutoring Environment
Orla Lahart, Declan Kelly, Brendan Tangney
<http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.20>http://doi.ieeecompu
tersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.20

Abstract:
Research suggests that parents with high levels of self-efficacy tend to make positive decisions about active engagement in the child's education, while parents with weak self-efficacy are often associated with less parental involvement. Therefore, endowing intelligent tutoring systems with the ability to adapt the level of support provided for the parent based on their self-efficacy may be of great benefit. Such a system might provide high levels of support for parents with low
self-efficacy, while providing lower levels of support for parents with high self-efficacy. This paper explores the effect of using such an adaptive system in the home-tutoring context and, in particular, reports on two complementary empirical studies. In the first study, a dynamic self-efficacy model, learned from runtime self-report data is used to provide adaptive support for the parent. In the second empirical study, the dynamic self-efficacy model was expanded to allow parents to request for further support outside what is deemed necessary based on their
self-efficacy model. Both studies comprised a control group which received full support regardless of their self-efficacy throughout the entire experiment. Results indicate clear increases in arental
self-efficacy as a result of the provision of adaptive support throughout the home-tutoring process.

Training Control Centers' Operators in Incident Diagnosis and Power Restoration Using Intelligent Tutoring Systems
Luiz Faria, António Silva, Zita Vale, Albino Marques
<http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.16>http://doi.ieeecompu
tersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.16

Abstract:
The activity of Control Center operators is important to guarantee the effective performance of Power Systems. Operators' actions are crucial to deal with incidents, especially severe faults like blackouts. In this paper, we present an Intelligent Tutoring approach for training Portuguese Control Center operators in tasks like incident analysis and diagnosis, and service restoration of Power Systems. Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) approach is used in the training of the operators, having into account context awareness and the unobtrusive integration in
the working environment. Several Artificial Intelligence techniques were criteriously used and combined together to obtain an effective Intelligent Tutoring environment, namely Multiagent Systems, Neural Networks, Constraint-based Modeling, Intelligent Planning, Knowledge Representation, Expert Systems, User Modeling, and Intelligent User Interfaces.

Rehearsing Naval Tactical Situations Using Simulated Teammates and an Automated Tutor
Emilio Remolina, Sowmya Ramachandran, Richard Stottler, Alex Davis
<http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.24>http://doi.ieeecompu
tersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.24

Abstract:
This paper describes a deployed simulation-based Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) for training of Tactical Action Officers (TAOs). The TAO on board a Navy ship is responsible for the operation of the entire watch team manning the ship's command center. The ITS goal is to train the TAO in command by negation, in which watchstanders perform their duties autonomously, while the TAO supervises, intervening in order to correct mistakes and rectify omissions. The ITS uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to provide Automated Role Players (ARPs) representing the watchstanders in the ship, and to provide a Natural Language interface to communicate with these automated teammates. An adaptive coaching strategy is used to provide coaching and feedback during an exercise. The paper presents a discussion of the ITS instructional design, its architecture, and the AI techniques it employs.

The ASSISTment Builder: Supporting the Life Cycle of Tutoring System Content Creation
Leena Razzaq, Jozsef Patvarczki, Shane F. Almeida, Manasi Vartak, Mingyu
Feng, Neil T. Heffernan, Kenneth R. Koedinger
<http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.23>http://doi.ieeecompu
tersociety.org/10.1109/TLT.2009.23

Abstract:
Content creation is a large component of the cost of creating educational software. Estimates are that approximately 200 hours of development time are required for every hour of instruction. We present an authoring tool designed to reduce this cost as it helps to refine and maintain content. The ASSISTment Builder is a tool designed to effectively create, edit, test, and deploy tutor content. The Web-based interface simplifies the process of tutor construction to allow users with little or no programming experience to develop content. We show the effectiveness of our Builder at reducing the cost of content creation to 40 hours for every hour of instruction. We describe new features that work toward supporting the life cycle of ITS content creation through maintaining and improving content as it is being used by students. The Variabilization feature allows the user to reuse tutoring content across similar problems. The Student Comments feature provides a way to maintain and improve content based on feedback from users. The Most Common Wrong Answer feature provides a way to refine remediation based on the users' answers. This paper describes our attempt to support the life cycle of content creation.