Friday, April 30, 2010

ACM Multimedia 2010 - Call for Workshop Papers

ACM Multimedia 2010 - Call for Workshop Papers
Deadlines : see on Workshops websites
http://www.acmmm10.org/
October 25-29th 2010 - Firenze, Italy

ACM Multimedia 2010 announces its Workshop program:

Multimedia Content

  • 1st ACM ARTEMIS2010 International Workshop on Analysis and Retrieval of Tracked Events and Motion in Imagery Streams
  • 3D Object Retrieval
  • 3D video processing
  • Machine Learning and Music (MML10)
  • Multimodal Pervasive Video Analysis, MPVA 2010
  • Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech (SSCS 2010)
  • Surreal media and Virtual Cloning
  • Very-Large-Scale Multimedia Corpus, Mining and Retrieval

Multimedia Systems

  • Advanced video streaming techniques for peer-to-peer networks and social networking
  • Mobile Cloud Media Computing
  • Mobile Video Delivery (MoViD)

Human Centered Multimedia

  • Affective Interaction in Natural Environments (AFFINE)
  • Connected Multimedia
  • Electronic Heritage and Digital Art Preservation (eHeritage)
  • Social Signal Processing (SSPW 2010)
  • Social, Adaptive and Personalized Multimedia Interaction and Access” (SAPMIA 2010)
  • The Second SIGMM Workshop on Social Media (WSM2010)

Multimedia Applications

Please link to the ACM MM2010 Workshop web page, look at workshops' topics and scopes and plan to submit your recent research results.

Programming and Tuning Massively Parallel Systems Summer School 2010

It is summer school time again!

Programming and Tuning Massively Parallel Systems Summer School
Barcelona Computing Week
BSC/UPC, Barcelona, Spain
July 5-9, 2010
http://bcw.ac.upc.edu


The Programming and Tuning Massively Parallel Systems Summer School (PUMPS) is aimed at enriching the skills of researchers, graduate students and teachers with cutting-edge technique and hands-on experience in developing applications for many-core processors with massively parallel computing resources like GPU accelerators.

- Co-Directors: Mateo Valero (BSC/UPC) and Wen-mei Hwu (UIUC)

- Instructors:
Wen-mei Hwu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and
David Kirk, NVIDIA Fellow, former chief science officer, NVIDIA
Corporation

The summer school is organized into three main tracks according to the
attendees' knowledge, expertise and interest levels. Participants should start at the appropriate entry level, and later optionally join other tracks in order to cover more advanced topics, multiple programming languages, specific numerical methods and evaluation tools.

- Beginners Track: The Beginners Track is an introduction to CUDA, OpenCL and OpenMP with labs/examples of increasing complexity, and case studies. Attendees may then join the Advanced Track and/or Programming Models sessions.

- Teachers Track: The Teachers Track includes special sessions on programming with GPUs for current and future teachers, and labs with educational material examples. Attendees may then join the Advanced Track and/or Programming Models sessions.

- Advanced Track: The Advanced Track focuses on optimizations and tuning of scientific and engineering Applications with specific sessions for Numerical Methods and Performance Evaluation Tools, and Programming Models for Supercomputing.

- Invited Lecturers:
- BSC and UPC: Rosa Badia, Jesus Labarta, Xavier Martorell, Jose-Maria Cela, Alex Duran
- Universitat Jaume I: Enrique S. Quintana-Ortí
- Universitat Pompeu Fabra: Gianni De Fabritiis

Instructors Wen-mei Hwu and David Kirk, co-authors of "Programming Massively Parallel Processors, A Hands-on Approach", will provide students with knowledge and hands-on experience in developing applications for many-core processors, such as general purpose graphics processing units (GPUs).

Participants will have access to a multi-node cluster of GPUs, and will learn to program and optimize applications in CUDA, OpenCL, OpenMP and StaRSs. Teaching assistants will be available to help with assignments.

Case studies on Molecular Dynamics, MRI Reconstruction, RTM Stencil and Dense Linear Systems will be presented. Advanced topics will cover optimization techniques for numerical methods like FFT, Graph, Tiling, Grid, MonteCarlo, FDTD, and Sparse matrices.

- Important Dates:
Applications due: May 20
Notification of acceptance: June 1
Summer school: July 5-9, 2010

- Location: Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya UPC, Barcelona, Spain

- Complete information and program: http://bcw.ac.upc.edu

PUMPS is organized by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and HiPEAC Network of Excellence.

Contact: bcw2010@bcw.ac.upc.edu


Data-intensive geospatial computing

Call for Papers

A special issue on data-intensive geospatial computing with International Journal of Geographical Information Science

http://fromto.hig.se/~bjg/ijgis/

Data-intensive computing has been emerging as a fourth scientific paradigm from the mainstream computer science. In terms of the techniques and technologies involved, this fourth paradigm is fundamentally distinct from the third one called computational science focusing on simulating complex phenomena or processes since the invention of computers. The massive data volume and ever increasing computing power in the twenty-first century will dramatically change the ways of doing science and scholarly communications. We believe therefore that this emerging new paradigm has profound implications to geographic information science and various applications to environment and urban systems. CyberGIS is an emerging phenomenon where geographic information systems or science (GIS) meets cyberinfrastructure for data-intensive geospatial computing. Many unsolvable problems with environmental and urban systems can be well studied using the continuously increasing geospatial data, collected through massively deployed positioning technologies, sensor networks and voluntary contributions by individuals, and ever increasing computing power of personal computers, higher performance computers, and emerging grid/cloud computing facilities. This special issue of International Journal of Geographical Information Science is seeking original unpublished papers that describe recent advances and efforts in data-intensive geospatial computing, with particular applications to environment and urban systems.

Suggested topics include (but are not limited to):

• Intensively computing volunteered geographic information for geographic knowledge discovery

• Grid/cloud computing geographic data for unsolvable or hard-to-solve GIS problems

• Massive agent-based simulation of nonlinear geographic phenomena and processes

• Analyzing large-scale geosensor networks data for monitoring environment and urban systems

• Deployment and development of web mapping processing services for various applications

Submission:

All manuscripts including any support material should be submitted using the journal's online Manuscript Central facility (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijgis). We encourage authors to consider this option of support materials archiving of data and video clips, which is a distinguished feature of this special issue. Authors must select “Special Issue” while they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process, and identify the “data-intensive geospatial computing” special issue in their cover letter. First-time users must register themselves as Author.

Important dates:

Paper submission due: 30 September 2010

Acceptance notification: 31 January 2010

Publication of the issue: 30 April 2011

Guest editor:

Bin Jiang, Department of Technology and Built Environment, University of Gävle, Sweden

Email: bin.jiang@hig.se , Web: http://fromto.hig.se/~bjg/


IEEE Intl. Conference on Semantic Computing 2010 - Deadline extended

Due to many requests, the submission deadline has been extended to May 17th, 2010.


Call for Papers

Fourth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing

IEEE ICSC2010

September 22nd-24th, 2010, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

http://www.ieee-icsc.org/

Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society

The field of Semantic Computing addresses the derivation and matching of the semantics of computational content to that of naturally expressed user intentions in order to retrieve, manage, manipulate or even create content, where "content" may be anything including video, audio, text, processes, services, hardware, networks, etc.

The fourth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC2010) continues to foster the growth of a new research community. The conference builds on the success of the past ICSC conferences as an international forum for researchers and practitioners to present research that advances the state of the art and practice of Semantic Computing, as well as identifying emerging research topics and defining the future of the field. The event is located in Pittsburgh, PA. The technical program of ICSC2010 includes workshops, invited keynotes, paper presentations, panel discussions, industrial "show and tells", demos, and more. Submissions of high-quality papers describing mature results or on-going work are invited.

The main goal of the conference is to foster the dialog between experts in each sub-discipline. Therefore we especially encourage submissions of work that is interesting to multiple areas, such
as multimodal approaches.

Please refer to the conference website for further information:
http://www.ieee-icsc.org/

Areas of interest include:

Semantics based Analysis
- Natural language processing
- Image and video analysis
- Audio and speech analysis
- Data and web mining
- Behavior of software, services and networks
- Security
- Analysis of social networks

Semantic Integration
- Metadata and other description languages
- Database schema integration
- Ontology integration
- Interoperability and service integration
- Semantic programming languages and software engineering
- Semantic system design and synthesis

Applications using Semantics
- Search engines and question answering
- Semantic web services
- Content-based multimedia retrieval and editing
- Context-aware networks of sensors, devices and applications
- Machine translation
- Music description
- Medicine and Biology
- GIS systems and architecture

Semantic Interfaces
- Natural language interfaces
- Multimodal interfaces
- Human centered computing


SUBMISSIONS

Regular Papers. Authors are invited to submit an 8-page technical paper manuscript in double-column IEEE format following the guidelines available on the ICSC2010 web page under "submissions".

Demonstration Papers. Authors are invited to submit an 2-page technical paper manuscript in double-column IEEE format following the guidelines available on the ICSC2010 web page under "demonstrations".

Workshops and Special Sessions. The organizing committee invites proposals for workshops and special sessions to be held in conjunction with the conference. These will focus on specific topics of the main conference. More information is available on the ICSC2010 web page.

The Conference Proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press. Distinguished quality papers presented at the conference will be selected for publications in internationally
renowned journals.

IMPORTANT DATES
Regular Paper Submission: May 17th, 2010 (extended)
Demo Descriptions: May 17th, 2010 (extended)
Notification of acceptance of main conference papers: TBD
Camera-Ready copy of accepted papers: TBD

ACM Multimedia Technologies for Distance Leaning (MTDL 2010)

Paper submission page:

http://www.edas.info/newPaper.php?c=9061&track=10089

Paper submission deadline: 21 May, 2010


The Second ACM International Workshop on

Multimedia Technologies for Distance Leaning (MTDL 2010)

Firenze, Italy, October 29, 2010

http://MTDL2010.mine.tku.edu.tw

In conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2010


Multimedia technologies and networking infrastructure have changed human social behavior. One typical example is education. The impact of distance learning to traditional universities in particular allows educational professionals to rethink about how to efficiently and effectively using multimedia technologies to improve instruction, as well as to encourage students to learn. Although multimedia technologies have already been used widely in e-learning, various considerations should be carefully addressed from both pedagogical and technological perspectives, to ensure the successful incorporation of these technologies in e-learning.

This ACM workshop aims to discuss problems, current studies, and solutions in how to use multimedia and communication technologies to improve e-learning. Especially, presentations should address the difference between using and without using multimedia technologies in education. Practical solutions are encouraged, although pedagogical theories may be used to support the solutions.

The conference proceedings will be published by ACM. Topics of interests include but are not limited to the following:

· Efficient Authoring Methods for Instruction Creation/Generation

· Management of Multimedia Learning Objects

· Multimedia Edutainment Technologies

· Multimedia Technologies for Collaborative Learning

· Multimedia Technologies for Game-based Learning

· Multimedia Technologies for Mobile/Situated Learning

· Multimodal Interactions for e-Learning

· Pedagogical Issues of using Multimedia Technologies in e-Learning

· Real-time Delivery of Multimedia Instructions

· Retrieval of Multimedia Learning Objects

· Server and System Architecture for Multimedia Instructions

· Usability Study of Multimedia Learning Objects

Submission Details

Each paper for submission should be formatted using the ACM Proceedings templates. It should be written in 9 points and must not be longer than 10 pages in length, including references and figures. Authors may submit their papers in PDF format via the ACM Multimedia 2010 paper submission system. Note that the review process is double-blind, i.e., all submissions must contain no information identifying the authors or their organizations.

The submission Web page is http://www.edas.info/newPaper.php?c=9061&track=10089. Please log in with your existing EDAS account or register a new one.

For information, please contact Timothy K. Shih at tshih@cs.tku.edu.tw.

Important Dates

Paper Submission: 21 May, 2010
Author Notification: 5 July, 20010
Final Manuscript Due: 26 July, 2010

Organizing Committee

Workshop Co-Chairs

Timothy K. Shih, Asia University, Taiwan
Rynson Lau, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, University of Geneva, Switzerland

Technical Program Co-Chairs

Baltasar Fernandez-Manjsn, University Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Marc Spaniol, Max-Planck-Institute, Germany

Web Site Chair

Hui-Huang Hsu, Tamkang University, Taiwan

Publicity Co-Chairs

Frederick Li, Durham University, U.K.
Qing Li, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Maiga Chang, Athabasca University, Canada
Nicoletta Sala, U. of Lugano, Switzerland and U. dell'Insubria Varese, Italy

Program Committee

Daniel Burgos, ATOS Origin S.A., Spain
Thomas Connolly, University of the West of Scotland, UK
Giuliana Dettori, ITD-CNR, Italy
Hongbo Fu, CityU, HK
Maria Grazia Ierardi, IMATI-CNR, Italy
Christian Gütl, Technical University of Graz, Austria
Jenq-Neng Hwang, U Washington, USA
Qun Jin, Waseda U, Japan
Kinshuk, Atabasca University, Canada
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen U, Germany
Carlos Delgado Kloos, Carlos III University, Spain
Ricky Kwok, Colorado State U, USA
Hong Va Leong, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, HK
Clement Leung, Victoria University of Technology, Australia
Howard Leung, City University of Hong Kong, HK
Yiu-Wing Leung, HKBU, HK
Frederick Li, Durham U, UK
Qing Li, CityU, HK
Stephan Lukosch, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
Harald Mayer, Joanneum Research, Austria
Pablo Moreno-Ger, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Elvira Popescu, Unviersity of Craiova, Romania
Philippos Pouyioutas, University of Nicosia, Cyprus
Nicoletta Sala, UIS, Switzerland
Yuanchun Shi, Tsinghua U, China
Martin Wolpers, Fraunhofer FIT, St. Augustin, Germany
Vicente Romero Zaldivar, ATOS Origin S.A., Spain

Thursday, April 29, 2010

ACM Workshop on Advanced Video Streaming Techniques for Peer-to-Peer Networks and Social Networking 2010

Paper submission deadline: June 10, 2010

CfP: ACM Workshop on Advanced Video Streaming Techniques for
Peer-to-Peer Networks and Social Networking

Workshop held within ACM Multimedia, 25-29 October 2010, Firenze, Italy

http://www.p2pstreaming.eu

Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a promising technology for video streaming, and offers advantages in terms of robustness, re-configurability and scalability. In this context, social networks and social services are emerging as a potential new driver for content delivery networks. Specifically, social networks potentially provide a new level of understanding and knowledge related to the interaction between people within a virtual space. Many emerging multimedia based services and applications have started to exploit the ‘social graph’ in new ways for establishing a basis for social recommendations, filtering etc.). As yet, one unexplored area of research relates to the exploiting the social graph for informing adaptive behaviour in P2P-based multimedia systems. On the other hand, the P2P video technology is still challenging, due to the need of reducing start-time and churn-induced instability, to the asymmetry of residential broadband connections, and to high packet loss rates due to router congestion and transmission
errors on the physical network, node departure from the P2P overlay, strict timing out due to real time visualization. The lack of guarantee about the actual delivery of the data may cause drops in the reproduction quality and service outages. The workshop objective is to solicit novel contributions on all aspects of P2P-based video coding, streaming, and content distribution which is informed by social networks.


Topics of interest include, but are not limited to
- Innovative P2P-based video streaming solutions
- P2P-based social media content distribution networks
- Advanced video coding techniques for real-time P2P applications: layered/scalable video coding, multiple description coding, distributed source coding
- Identification and design of proper metrics for performance evaluation and monitoring including Quality of Service/Experience
- Content and context analysis and modelling for P2P-based social media distribution
- Filtering and recommendation systems
- Error-resilience tools for peer-to-peer multimedia services
- Rate control and bandwidth adaptation for both single streams and multiple stream multiplexing
- Cross layer optimization issues
- Protocols for peer-to-peer multimedia services
- P2P streaming prototype implementation for both live and on-demand streaming
- Advertisement, payment, and cashing systems
- Applications, standards, and practical deployments


Invited Talk
Audio/visual content and metadata delivered over the open Internet using P2P-Next: some experiences from a broadcaster's perspective by George Wright, Head of Prototyping, BBC Research and Development


The best paper award (€300) is sponsored by RADVISION (http://www.radvision.com/).

Important Dates
- Paper submission: June 10, 2010
- Notification of acceptance: July 10, 2010
- Camera-ready submission: July 20, 2010
- Workshop date: October 29, 2010


Submission Guidelines
Papers should not exceed five pages in length, following the ACM proceedings format. Papers must be original and have not been published or under consideration for publication elsewhere. Each paper will be reviewed by three members of the program committee, recognised for their competence in the field. Final decision about inclusion in the workshop proceedings will be taken by the PC members exclusively on the basis of the obtained reviews and levels of recommendation. Papers must be registered using the ACM Multimedia conference management software (http://www.edas.info/N9045). Accepted papers will be included in the workshop's proceedings which will be published together with the proceedings of the ACM Multimedia Conference 2010. Additionally, a special issue or an edited volume is planed based on the best papers of the workshop.


Workshop Organisers:
Gabriella Olmo, Politecnico di Torino
Christian Timmerer, Klagenfurt University
Pascal Frossard, EPFL
Keith Mitchell, University of Lancaster

Demonstrations
Njål Borch, NORUT, Norway

Program Committee (preliminary)
Jari Ahola, VTT, Finland
Peter Amon, Siemens, Germany
Riccardo Bernardini, Università di Udine, Italy
Njål Borch, NORUT, Norway
Giancarlo Calvagno, Università di Padova, Italy
Luca Celetto, STMicroelectronics, Italy
Jaime Delgado, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
Marek Domanski, Poznan University of Technology, Poland
Marco Grangetto, Università di Torino, Italy
Hermann Hellwagner, Klagenfurt University, Austria
Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen, Germany
Mathias Lux, Klagenfurt University, Austria
Enrico Magli, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
Pierangelo Migliorati, Università di Brescia, Italy
Daniel Negru, University of Bordeaux, France
Jens-Rainer Ohm, RWTH Aachen, Germany
Jörn Ostermann, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany
Giovanni Pau, University of California at Los Angeles, US
Fernando Pereira, IST, Portugal
Roberto Rinaldo, Università di Udine, Italy
Thomas Schierl, HHI, Germany
Iraj Sodagar, Microsoft, US
Tammam Tillo, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Workshop "Digital Social Networks": Extended Deadline

*Extended* Call for Papers - 3rd Workshop Digital Social Networks

Deadline May 9th, 2010;
New: Optional Special Issue i-com

One Day Workshop at the annual meeting of the
German Society for Computer Science (GI), Sept. 27th - Oct. 2nd, 2010,
Leipzig

Date of the Workshop: to be announced
Coordinator: Clemens Cap (University of Rostock)

Positioning of the Event: After the good acceptance of the 1st Workshop (annual meeting of the GI in 2008) and 2nd Workshop (2009 in Lübeck) a Dagstuhl Perspectives Seminar took place in January 2010. This is the call for papers of the 3rd Workshop on Digital Social Networks. An
overview of the past events can be found on the website http://www.digitale-soziale-netze.de.

Topic: Social relations and the resulting social networks are an important basis for social and technological development. With the technologies and concepts of Web 2.0, new digital forms of support are available for a development of participatory social networks. Social Software and Social Media as new form of cooperation systems enable new modes of collaboration. The economic success of portals illustrates the demand for such solutions as well as the difficulty of a proper economic evaluation. From the point of view of the user, questions of privacy, data protection and identity theft are getting more important. Users of several systems need interoperability and data exchange. Besides purely technological questions also topics of media presence in open and semi open forums and sociological phenomena are becoming relevant. With
ubiquitous access to human communication acts on these platforms new possibilities for analyzing social networks become possible - up to the prognosis of social trends.

Specific Issues: The workshop on digital social networks will analyze these issues from theoretical and practical points of view. Contributions are solicited on these topics:
- Social software and "social media"
- Social search engines and aggregators
- Methods for analyzing digital social networks and social interaction
- Trust, reputation, authentic contents and social control in digital networks
- Applications, services and APIs on social portals
- Social networking services in science
- Trend analysis and prognosis on social portals
- Special graph properties in social networks
- Technical modeling of social structures
- Business cases and economic evaluation of digital social networks
- Legal and social aspects of online communities
- Social networks and games
- Security, privacy, identity protection and media usage in social portals
- Interoperability, data exchange and data synchronization in social portals
- Personalization and adaptation to user preference
- User behavior in digital social networks
- Case studies, if they exhibit unique features

Program: The contributions shall be up to 6 pages in length in LNI format and present in German or English language original, unpublished research results. The papers will be published in a printed proceedings volume Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) of the annual meeting of the
GI and also on DVD / USB stick. There's the possibility to publish a long version on DVD / USB stick. Reports on practical experiences are welcome if they exhibit new or special features, also interdisciplinary contributions are solicited. The goal is a good mixture of theoretical and practical research, each of which will be presented in a half-day session. All contributions are refereed anonymously by at least three members of the program committee. Contributions of the program committee are permitted. More information about the LNI format can be found on the website http://www.gi-ev.de/service/publikationen/lni/ .

Special Issue: The authors of the best contributions for the workshop will be invited to submit an extended, enhanced version to a special issue of i-com http://www.i-com-media.de/.

Acceptance Criteria: The criteria for acceptance are especially originality, novelty, innovation, selection and presentation of the ideas. The program committee also intends to select one or two keynotes by renowned specialists. As in last year we will again have a Future Network Best Paper Award sponsored by http://www.future-network.at/

Contact
Web Page: http://www.digitale-soziale-netze.de
Submission: http://139.18.8.225:8080/ConfISS/
Registration: http://www.informatik2010.de

Deadlines
Paper Submission May 9th, 2010
Notice to Authors June 3th, 2010
Final Version July 3rd, 2010
Special Issue for i-com October 1st, 2010

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

The International Workshop on Pervasive Media (PerMedia2010)

CALL FOR PAPERS

The International Workshop on Pervasive Media (PerMedia2010)

http://www-nishio.ist.osaka-u.ac.jp/~leishu/workshop/permedia/index.html

Held with
The 7th International Conference on Ubiquitous
Intelligence and Computing (UIC-10)

Technically Sponsored by
IEEE Task Force on Ubiquitous Intelligence and Computing

Xi'an, China, 26-29 October, 2010

Important Dates

Papers due 30 May 2010
Notification 15 Jul 2010
Camera-ready papers due 30 Jul 2010

Pervasive or ubiquitous computing defines a new paradigm of computing for 21st century as a result of ubiquity of computing beyond the mainframe and personal computers and advances of the media sensing,computing and usage along with the developments and applications of communication and networking. Traditional multimedia computing in pervasive computing environments faces new challenges in increasing number of ubiquitous media devices, media types, media content and semantic modeling, analysis and processing, media management, usage and services.

The Workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and industry practitioners to share their research experience, original results and practical developments on the specific challenges and emerging issues in pervasive or ubiquitous media computing.

PerMedia2010 covers all media related fundamentals, theories, models, technologies and applications in pervasive/ubiquitous systems and environments. The technical program will consist of invited speech, paper presentations and panel discussions.

The PerMedia2010 topics include but are not limited to the followings:

- Fundamentals and challenges of per-media
- Architecture and infrastructure for per-media
- Per-media input devices in ubiquitous/pervasive systems
- Environment-centric media in ubiquitous/pervasive systems
- Media communication and networking in ubiquitous/pervasive systems
- Server and service technologies for per-media
- Per-media database and content management
- Per-media indexing and retrieval
- Per-media content modeling and analysis
- Media context awareness in ubiquitous/pervasive systems
- Smart and intelligent media computing in ubiquitous/pervasive systems
- Per-media semantics and modeling
- Per-media data and knowledge mining
- Security, privacy, trust and safety issues for per-media
- Per-media user interfaces
- Per-media services and applications

Paper Preparation, Submission and Publication

Prospective authors are invited to submit an electronic verson of full papers in PDF format (not exceeding 6 pages) according to two-column formatting of IEEE Computer Society Conference Publishing Services. All papers are submitted as per the instructions on the Workshop website. Each paper will receive at least 3 peer reviews. At least one author should register for the workshop at full rate for the inclusion of the paper in the proceedings and is expected to present
their work at the Workshop.

The proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press (indexed by EI).

Workshop Organizing Committee

General Chairs:

- Timothy K. Shih, Tamkang University, Taiwan
- Lei Shu, Osaka University, Japan

Program Chairs:

- Xianfu Lei, Southwest Jiaotong University, China
- Haipeng Wang, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China

Steering Chairs:

- Jianhua Ma, Hosei Univeristy, Japan
- Laurence T. Yang, Francis Xavier University, Canada

Publicity Chairs:

- Lei Wang, Dalian Univ. of Tech., China
- Lisheng Fan, Shantou University, China

Program Committee:
See PerMedia2010 Website


Special issue ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST)

Call For Papers - "Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching Systems"

Special Issue of ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology

(http://tist.acm.org/CFPs/TIST-SI-ITCS.pdf)

Aims:

Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching Systems (IT&CS) are computer-based instructional systems with models of instructional contents that specify what to teach, and teaching strategies that specify how to teach, mostly driven by AI technologies including knowledge-based systems, machine learning, planning, multi-agent systems and ontology. With the Web boom in recent years, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in novel applications of IT&CS. These applications cover a wide range of traditional as well as new computer-aided instruction paradigms, like e-learning and distributed learning. At the same time, novel techniques including natural language processing, machine learning, planning, multi-agent systems, ontologies, semantic Web, and social and affective computing have been used in IT&CS with various levels of success. In the last several years, IT&CS have moved from research labs into the real world. Many systems were developed and deployed, even for critical and complex domains. The reported benefits demonstrated by the users of these systems are impressive. Thus, IT&CS is a good example of the use and combination of AI techniques with the Internet and Web information systems. The goal of this special issue is to solicit high quality, original research contributions on all aspects of intelligent tutoring and coaching systems, thereby capturing the state of the art and stimulating further developments in the related areas.

Topics:

In this special issue, we call for original papers describing some of the latest developments of Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching Systems. Areas of interests include, but not limited to:

. Technology advances in Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching;

. Educational software applications and games of Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching Systems;

. Simulation systems for Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching;

. Collaborative learning tools, devices and interfaces for Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching;

. Interactive techniques for Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching;

. Ontology for Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching;

. Standards and web services that support Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching;

. Authoring tools for Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching;

. Computer support for peer tutoring and learning via discovery or project work or field or lab work;

. Creation and management of learning objects for Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching.

Submission

Each paper for submission should be formatted in double spacing, single column, following the style and length limit of the ACM Transactions on TIST. A separate cover letter should be submitted that includes the paper title, the list of all authors and their affiliations, and information of the contact author. Each paper will be reviewed rigorously, and possibly in two rounds, i.e., minor/major revisions will undergo another round of review. Prospective authors are invited to submit papers via the online submission system of TIST at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tist (select the Special Issue of Intelligent Tutoring and Coaching Systems) before Oct. 1, 2010. Late submission will not be processed. Inquiries can be sent to csliuwy@cityu.edu.hk.

Schedule

Deadline for paper submission: October 1, 2010
Completion of first review: December 1, 2010
Minor/Major revision due (first round): January 1, 2011
Completion of second round of reviews: January 15, 2011
Minor revision due (second round): January 22, 2011
Final decision notification: February 1,2011
Publication date: 2011


Guest Editors

Qing Li
Department of Computer Science
City University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Email: itqli@cityu.edu.hk


Liu Wenyin
Department of Computer Science
City University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong
Email: csliuwy@cityu.edu.hk


Xiangfeng Luo
Department of Computer Science
Shanghai University
Shanghai, China
Email: luoxf@shu.edu.cn


Cristina Conati
Department of Computer Science
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada
Email: conati@cs.ubc.ca

Monday, April 26, 2010

2010 IEEE Intl. Workshop on Semantic Computing and Multimedia Systems (IEEE-SCMS 2010)

The 2010 IEEE International Workshop on Semantic Computing and Multimedia Systems (IEEE-SCMS 2010)

http://www.cis.uab.edu/kddm/scms10/index.htm

Held in conjunction with the Third IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (IEEE ICSC 2010)

With the proliferation of multimedia data (image, video, structured text, etc.) and the recent advances in networks and information technology, multimedia computing is having an unprecedented impact on every aspect of our life, from the personal use of multimedia mobile devices, such as iPod and PDA, to a wide spectrum of domains such as business and healthcare. The new multimedia standards (e.g., MPEG-21) facilitate the seamless integration of multiple modalities into interoperable multimedia frameworks, transforming the way people work and interact with multimedia data. These key technologies and multimedia solutions interact and collaborate with each other in an ever effective way, bringing along the multimedia revolution. Traditional multimedia research, which largely lies in signal processing and data communication, is now facing challenges posed by the new research trends such as multimedia semantic computing, multi-modal interaction and cross-mining, cooperative processing, new multimedia standards, Quality of Service (QoS), multimedia security, and social issues, which are just a few examples of the major research areas. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers in multimedia semantic computing to discuss the state of the art of the research on semantic-based multimedia systems, present theoretical frameworks and practical implementations, and identify challenges and open issues in multimedia semantic modeling and integration. Multimedia semantic computing can be defined as "Computing with (machine processable) Descriptions of Content and Intentions" of multimedia data and has been gaining attentions in various applications including pervasive multimedia computing systems, multimedia delivery over the network, personalized multimedia information retrieval systems which adapt to the user's needs, integration of semantic content and schema from distributed multimedia sources so that the user sees a unified view of heterogeneous data, clustering and classification of semantically-tied information in different multimedia modalities, security issues in multimedia/hypertext systems , etc. We invite researchers from various disciplines to submit original research contributions to this workshop.

IEEE SCMS 2010 will be held in conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (http://www.ieee-icsc.org/) Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:
* semantic content analysis
* semantic integration
* multimedia retrieval (image, video, audio, etc.)
* multimodal data analysis and interaction
* semantic media annotation
* human-centered multimedia computing
* image/video/audio databases
* multimedia data mining
* multimedia data storage
* social network analysis from multimedia
* multimedia data modeling
* distributed multimedia systems
* multimedia data visualization
* semantic media adaptation and personalization
* semantic based Internet data streaming and delivery
* Multimedia streaming and networking
* multimedia assurance and security
* semantic enabled multimedia applications
* novel applications

Instructions for authors:
Papers reporting original and unpublished research results on the above and related topics are solicited. Authors should submit a 6-page technical paper manuscript (in English) in double-column IEEE format including authors' names and affiliations, and a short abstract, following the document templates available on the ICSC2010 paper submission web site http://www.ieee-icsc.org/. Manuscripts should be sent as an attachment via email to one of the Program Chairs listed below on or before the deadline date of June 4th, 2010. All papers should be in Adobe portable document format (PDF). Submissions should include the name and the email address of
the corresponding author.

All submitted papers will be refereed for quality, originality and relevance by the Program Committee. The acceptance/rejection of the papers will be based on the review results. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings together with the proceedings of the IEEE ICSC 2010 conference.

Based on the quality of the manuscripts, selected papers will be invited to submit to a special issue of International Journal of Multimedia Data Engineering and Management (IJMDEM).

Important Dates:

Full Paper Submission Deadline: June 4, 2010 (PDF format)
Notification of Results: July 1, 2010
Camera Ready Due: TBA
Author Registration: TBA

Program Co-Chairs:

Chengcui Zhang (zhang@cis.uab.edu)
The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Hongli Luo (luoh@ipfw.edu)
Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne

Min Chen (chen@cs.umt.edu)
University of Montana

Funded PhD position in Dynamic Network Analysis, Mining and Modelling

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (www.deri.ie) at the National University of Ireland Galway is seeking applications for a funded PhD studentship in Dynamic Network Analysis, Mining and Modelling.

The successful candidate will join the Clique Strategic Research Cluster (www.cliquecluster.org) in DERI, Galway. Clique is a Science Foundation Ireland-funded research cluster addressing the development of analytical, modelling and visualisation techniques for large scale, dynamic graphs and networks. The cluster is distributed between DERI and University College Dublin, and has industry partners such as IBM.

The DERI group conducts fundamental algorithmic work as well as investigating and modelling the principles underlying the evolution and interactions in large social, communication and collaborative networks. Areas of interest include but are not limited to:
* Analysing user roles in social networks and designing efficient algorithms to find these [1];
* Analysing and modelling the interactions between online communities [2];
* Formulating predictive models for information diffusion in social and collaborative networks;
* Designing efficient graph algorithms to find evolving communities with correlated change behaviour [3];
* Designing scalable, distributed, real-time algorithms to tackle problems in massive dynamic graph datasets.

The successful candidate should have at least a bachelor’s degree in computer science, maths, science or engineering, and have the pre-requisites for PhD studies at NUI Galway (www.nuigalway.ie). The PhD studentship covers academic fees, a generous monthly stipend and a research travel allowance for a three year period.

In addition, the following criteria are desirable but not necessary:
* Familiarity with graph algorithms and theory (e.g., finding connected components efficiently);
* Familiarity with modelling and simulation;
* Familiarity with social network analysis;
* Familiarity with large-scale, distributed, dynamic data analysis (e.g., data streaming algorithms);
* Familiarity with data mining, feature selection and machine learning, especially graph mining and graph grammars;
* Masters or equivalent degree in a relevant discipline or topic;

The successful candidate will work with the DERI Principle Investigator, Dr. Conor Hayes, Dr. Jeffrey Chan and Dr. Marcel Karnstedt in the Clique Research Cluster at DERI, Galway (see uimr.deri.ie). There will be extensive opportunities for collaboration with other Clique researchers (see www.cliquecluster.org/content/people) and with other research groups and projects in DERI.

Interested applicants should send an application with the subject header CLIQUE_PhD_10 to conor.hayes@deri.org.
The application must contain the following: a CV, a one page statement explaining the candidate's interest in the position as well as their suitability, and a list of referees. Applications that do not follow this format will not be considered. Closing date: May 31th, 2010.

References:
[1] Jeffrey Chan and Conor Hayes, "Decomposing Discussion Forums using User Roles", in Proceedings of 2nd Web Science Conference 2010, USA, 2010.
[2] Marcel Karnstedt and Conor Hayes, "Towards Cross-Community Effects in Scientific Communities" in Knowledge Discovery, Data Mining and Machine Learning, 2009.
[3] Jeffrey Chan, James Bailey and Christopher Leckie, "Discovering correlated spatio-temporal changes in evolving graphs", in Knowledge and Information Systems, 16(1), 2008.

The Tenth International Workshop on Multimedia Data Mining (MDMKDD 2010)

CALL FOR PAPERS*
Tenth International Workshop on Multimedia Data Mining

In conjunction with KDD-2010, July 25, Washington, DC, USA

https://sites.google.com/site/mdmkdd2010/


Aims and Scope
The objective of the workshop is to bring together experts in the analysis of digital media content, multimedia databases, knowledge engineers and domain experts from different applied disciplines with potential in multimedia data mining. The major topics of the workshop include but are not limited to the following:

Topics of Interest
- Data mining of media rich platforms (on-line communities, blogs, social networks, virtual communities, virtual worlds)
- Data mining of large datasets of user generated content (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, etc.)
- Integrated mining of different data formats (text, speech, video, images, relational data)
- Merging and integration of mining results from different sources
- Mining of data streams combined with structured data
- Representation and reuse of discovered multimedia knowledge.
- Mining scientific multimedia data.
- Man-machine interfaces for multimedia data mining.
- Multimodal techniques for interactive multimedia data mining and exploration.
- Complexity, efficiency and scalability of multimedia data mining algorithms.
- Real-time multimedia data mining systems.
- Knowledge representation and integration for multimedia data mining
- Multimedia data mining techniques for specific domains and applications (e.g., biomedicine, education, entertainment, security, animation, art, etc.)
- Theoretical frameworks for multimedia data mining.
- Multimedia data-specific sampling and preprocessing.
- Topic and event discovery in large multimedia repositories


Paper Submission
Papers should be at most 10 pages long, single-spaced, in font size 10 or larger with one-inch margins on all sides. Paper should be submitted in PDF format using the ACM SIG Proceedings templates http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates to the e-mail address mdm2010workshop@gmail.com

Software demonstrations are welcome. We encourage submissions of 'greenhouse' work, which present early stages of cutting-edge research and development.

Papers accepted for presentation at the workshop will be published in the workshop proceedings and at the ACM digital library.

Important Dates
- Papers Submission deadline: May 7, 2010
- Notification of Acceptance: May 21, 2010
- Camera ready submission: May 28, 2010
- Workshop Presentation: July 25, 2010


Organizing Committee
Jia-Yu (Tim) Pan (Google, Mountain View, CA, USA)
Valery A. Petrushin (The Nielsen Company, USA)
Cees G.M. Snoek (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)

Friday, April 23, 2010

Postdoctoral position in distributed text mining

POSTDOCTORAL POSITION WITHIN THE AREA OF DISTRIBUTED TEXT MINING AT THE NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

A post-doctoral position in the area of distributed text mining within the COMIDOR project is available at the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDI) in the Faculty of Information Technology, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering (IME), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

COMIDOR (Cooperative Mining of Independent Document Repositories) is a research project at NTNU that will focus on the mechanisms and algorithms necessary to perform mining of independent document repositories. COMIDOR is funded by the Norwegian Research Council.

Traditionally, text mining has been performed on a single text collection, and in the case of collections from several repositories these collections have first been merged before performing the mining process. In some application areas, merging of collections is not acceptable. For example, some repositories can not be merged for legal reasons, while some can not be merged because of risk of revealing classified information. In the COMIDOR project the aim is to develop
new solutions to mining of independent document repositories without communication of base repositories. A more detailed description of the project can be found at http://research.idi.ntnu.no/comidor/.

The candidate should have a Ph.D. in Computer Science with solid knowledge of text mining, data mining, or distributed data management, and familiarity with program development. The postdoc position is for two years.

For more information, please Prof. Kjetil Norvag (project leader), noervaag at idi.ntnu.no. Specific Conditions: The postdoc position is placed in Norwegian salary code 1352, gross NOK 446.700 per year (equivalent to approx. EUR 56.500 and USD 75.600).

Living Costs in Norway: A rule of thumb is that one pays appr. 35% tax on net income. Public health care system is free for all (due to the tax level). Generally there is no need for private health care insurances. Education on all levels is free for all. Housing normally cost between NOK
4000 (for a simple one bed studio with kitchenette, possibly shared bathroom) and 8000 (for a 3-4 piece apartment suitable for a small family) per month.

Application procedure: The application should as a minimum include the following: 1) Curriculum Vitae, 2) Certified copies of diplomas awarding the relevant degree(s), 3) a description of the candidate's research interests and how they can contribute with their competencies to the objectives of the project. Copies of publications and any other work which the applicant wishes to be taken into account should also be enclosed. Joint works will be considered. If it is difficult to specify the input of the applicant in a joint work, a short summary should be attached outlining the applicant's input. Please list the submitted publications in the application.

Applications are to be submitted electronically at https://secure.jobbnorge.no/job.aspx?jobid=66370 no later than the application closing date. Applications should be marked IME-025-2010, and we prefer all attachments in one file.

Closing date (yyyy-mm-dd): 2010-05-14

3rd International Workshop on Automated Information Extraction in Media Production (AIEMPro'10)

3rd International Workshop on
Automated Information Extraction in Media Production

AIEMPro'10


http://www.crit.rai.it/attivita/AIEMPro10/index.html


In conjunction with ACM Multimedia 2010
Florence, 29 October 2010

CALL FOR PAPERS

The third Workshop on Automated Information Extraction in Media Production (AIEMPro10) aims at fostering exchange of ideas and of practises between leading experts in research and leading actors in the media community, in order to catalyse the migration towards new ways of producing media content, aided by large scale introduction of tools for automated multimedia analysis and understanding. On the other hand, the workshop should help researchers in better understanding what are some real-life key requirements which would enable their scientific developments come into wider adoption. The explosion of new media distribution channels based on the Internet and the new production workflows based on digital computer-based tools is forcing nerw business models for in media industry. Internet-based multimedia fruition model, e.g. as recently promoted by the European Commission Future Internet Initiative, is progressively substituting the traditional one-to-many broadcasting model. To cope with these new trends, broadcasters have been changing their approach, trying to embrace these new models into their facilities, though the overall economic convenience of these initiatives is still to be fully proved.

Media production workflows are substantially influenced by new ways of acquiring, elaborating and publishing audiovisual material. In this context, automatic information extraction techniques based on audiovisual content analysis are seen as an interesting and promising option to streamline these processes and lower the total cost of new productions, and as a way to help to disseminate existing archives. This line of development has been fully recognised by the European Broadcasting Union as of crucial importance, by setting up a specific technical group on the subject (EC-M/SCAIE).

Though an immense amount of resources are spent by the research community in the broadly recognised area of multimedia semantic extraction, unfortunately little exploitation of these efforts has happened in industrial applications.

The workshop aims at attracting the attention of researchers and practitioners in the field of automatic information extraction based on audiovisual content analysis on the problems related with media production processes. In particular, the objective is to analyse the impact and performances of these tools in real-life applications, and on real-life material.

Authors are encouraged to submit papers on which they enlighten the features of existing or novel tools in the key aspects of future media production based on automated information extraction, including acquisition, editing, publishing, archiving and repurposing of audiovisual material. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Efficient and real-time audiovisual indexing in acquisition
• Automated repurposing of archived material on new media channels
• Automated news production
• Efficient indexing and retrieval of multimedia streams
• Automatic speech recognition and personality identification (e.g. face or speaker identification)
• Collaborative systems for media production
• Multimodal topic and concept detection
• Information Retrieval systems from Multimedia Archives
• Mechanisms for the estimation of the trust of news
• Opinion mining and Sentiment Analysis over news and media streams
• Ontologies and metadata formats
• Large scale processing of heterogeneous data
• HCI for efficient annotation and retrieval
• Automated material copyright infraction detection and material fingerprinting
• Content summarisation (e.g., sports highlights)
• Audiovisual genre and editorial format detection and characterisation
• Cross-media indexing and integration
• Content segmentation tools (e.g., shot and semantic scene segmentation)
• Applications of MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 standard
• Evaluation methods for multimedia analysis tools including data
sets and standard resources (e.g. reference dictionaries for ASR)

The organising committee will make available a considerable amount of audiovisual material taken from some of the major European broadcasters archives. Perspective authors may test their technologies on this material, in order to further prove the effectiveness of their research in a real scenario. Contact the workshop organisers to get information about how to get the material.

Test material for experimentation is available at the Online Media Asset Management System "Mammie" provided by the organizers. Download is conditioned to some terms and conditions for the use of the material.

You can find the full text on the register page of the Mammie system.

By clicking on the link below, you will be redirected to the "Mammie" system. Use to Register link and fill out the form as accurate as possible to request your access to the system. After manual verification of your request (which can take up to 5 days), you will be notified about your
approval to use the system.
http://media.ibbt.be/mammie

The recommended length for papers is 6 pages, following the ACM Proceedings format (full information available at the ACM Multimedia Submission Page). Simultaneous submission to another conference/workshop/journal is not allowed. Papers must be original and have not been published or under consideration for publications elsewhere. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three members of the programme committee recognised for their competence in the field covered by the paper.

Final decision about inclusion in the workshop proceedings will be taken by the PC members exclusively on the basis of the obtained reviews and levels of recommendation.

Papers must be registered using the ACM Multimedia conference management software (http://edas.info)

ORGANIZERS

Robbie De Sutter, VRT Medialab
Jean-Pierre Evain, EBU
Alberto Messina, RAI CRIT
Masanori Sano, NHK STRL

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission: June 4th 2010
Notification of Acceptance: July 5th 2010
Camera Ready due: July 26th 2010

RecSys 2010 International Workshop on Information Heterogeneity and Fusion in Recommender Systems (HetRec 2010)

1st Call for Papers

International Workshop on Information Heterogeneity and Fusion in
Recommender Systems (HetRec 2010)
26 or 30 September 2010 | Barcelona, Spain
http://ir.ii.uam.es/hetrec2010/

In conjunction with the
4th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2010)
http://recsys.acm.org/2010/

Important dates

* Paper submission: 30 June 2010
* Notification of paper acceptance: 22 July 2010
* Camera-ready copies of accepted papers: 30 July 2010
* HetRec 2010 Workshop: 26 or 30 September 2010

Motivation

Recent years have shown much progress in the field of recommender systems, including the development of innovative models and very efficient algorithms. Almost all current systems are trying to make best use of a single kind of data, and are designed for specific domains and applications, without explicitly addressing the heterogeneity of the existing information. As an example, some systems are based on analyzing user ratings, while others concentrate on understanding purchase history.

Recognizing this limitation, research attention has been given to finding ways for combining/integrating/mediating user models for the purpose of providing better personalized services to users in many information seeking and ecommerce services. See for example the work done in the series of UbiqUM workshops that traditionally takes place at conferences related to user modelling, such as UMAP, IUI and ECAI. In spite of prior work, however, the issue remained one of the major challenges for recommender systems.

The heterogeneity of personal information sources can be identified in any of the three pillars of a recommendation algorithm: the modelling of user preferences, the description of resource contents, and the modelling and exploitation of the context in which recommendations are made.

Increasingly, users create and manage more and more profiles in online systems for different purposes, such as leisure (e.g., Facebook), professional interests (e.g., LinkedIn), or specialized applications (e.g., LearnCentral for educational issues, PatientsLikeMe for health issues,
etc.). Similarly, rated, tagged or bookmarked resources belong to distinct multimedia: text (e.g., del.icio.us, BibSonomy, Google News), image (e.g., Flickr, Picasa), audio (e.g., Last.fm, Spotify), or video (e.g., MovieLens, NetFlix, YouTube). Moreover, recommendation algorithms may also present heterogeneity based on different types of input (e.g., explicit feedback from ratings, reviews, tags, etc. vs. implicit feedback from records of views, queries and purchases), or based on different levels of input granularities (e.g., a user may not only rate individual songs, but also
albums, artists or even a full music genre).

Finally, contextual factors also increase heterogeneity in recommender systems. Location and time are key external elements that may affect the relevance of the recommendations, as shown in recent works. Many other factors can be taken into account as well, such as physical and social
environment, device and network settings, and external events, to name a few. Approaches that integrate several of these factors into recommendation models are needed.

HetRec workshop aims to attract the attention of students, faculty and professionals both from academia and industry who are interested in addressing and exploiting any of the above forms of information heterogeneity and fusion in recommender systems. The work goals are broad.
First, we would like to raise awareness of the potential of using multiple information sources. Then, we look for sharing expertise and suitable models. Another dire need is for strong datasets, and one of our aims is to establish benchmarks and standard datasets on which the problem would be studied following the workshop. Our hope is that this workshop will put a
basis for a line of works, and will help shaping the research agenda.

Topics of interest

The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in addressing the challenges posed by information heterogeneity in recommender systems and studying information fusion in this context. We aim at identifying the main challenges, suggesting and discussing novel ideas for addressing these challenges, and proposing a research agenda for
future research at the domain.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Heterogeneity and fusion of information in user profiles

* Fusion of user profiles from different representations
* Combination of short- and long-term user preferences
* Combination of different types of user preferences: tastes, interests, needs, goals, mood, etc.
* Cross domain recommendations, based on user preferences about different interest aspects (e.g., by merging movie and music tastes)
* Cross representation recommendations, considering diverse sources of
user preferences: explicit and implicit feedback

Heterogeneity and fusion of information in recommended resources

* Recommendation of resources of different nature: news, reviews, scientific papers, etc.
* Recommendation of resources belonging to different multimedia: text, image, audio, video
* Recommendation of resources annotated in different languages

Heterogeneity and fusion of information in contextual features

* Contextualisation of user preferences (e.g., user preferences at work, on holidays, etc.)
* Cross context recommendations (e.g., by merging information about location, time, social aspects, etc.)
* Multi-dimensional recommendation based on several contextual features (e.g., physical and social environment, device and network settings, external events, etc.)

Organizing Committee

* Peter Brusilovsky, University of Pittsburgh, USA
* Iván Cantador, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
* Yehuda Koren, Yahoo! Labs
* Tsvi Kuflik, University of Haifa, Israel
* Markus Weimer, Yahoo! Labs

Contact information

Contact e-mail: hetrec2010@easychair.org


Thursday, April 22, 2010

Mashup Cultures, Springer Wien – New York

MASHUP CULTURES

Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan (Ed.)
1st Edition., 2010, 256 p. 41 illus., Softcover
ISBN: 978-3-7091-0095-0
http://www.springer.com/springerwiennewyork/art/book/978-3-7091-0095-0

ABOUT THIS BOOK
This volume brings together cutting-edge thinkers and scholars (Henry Jenkins, Mizuku Ito, David Gauntlett) together with young researchers and students, proposing a colourful spectrum of media-theoretical, -practical and -educational approaches to current creative practices and
techniques of production and consumption on and off the web. Along with the exploration of some of the emerging social media concepts, the book unveils some of the key drivers leading to participatory engagement of the User.

Mashup Cultures presents a broader view of the effects and consequences of current remix practices and the recombination of existing digital cultural content. The complexity of this book, which appears on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the international MA study program
ePedagogy Design – Visual Knowledge Building, also by necessity seeks to familiarize the reader with a profound glossary and vocabulary of Web 2.0 cultural techniques.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss: Introduction: Mashups, Remix Practices and the Recombination of Existing Digital Content;
  • Axel Bruns: Distributed Creativity: Filesharing and Produsage;
  • Brenda Castro: The Virtual Art Garden: A Case Study of User-centered Design for Improving Interaction in Distant Learning Communities of Art Students;
  • Doris Gassert: "You met me at a very strange time in my life." Fight Club and the Moving Image on the Verge of 'Going Digital';
  • David Gauntlett: Creativity, Participation and Connectedness: An Interview with David Gauntlett;
  • Mizuko Ito: Mobilizing the Imagination in Everyday Play: The Case of Japanese Media Mixes;
  • Henry Jenkins: Multiculturalism, Appropriation, and the New Media Literacies: Remixing Moby Dick;
  • Owen Kelly: Sexton Blake & the Virtual Culture of Rosario: A Biji; Torsten Meyer: On the Database Principle: Knowledge and Delusion;
  • Eduardo Navas: Regressive and Reflexive Mashups in Sampling Culture;
  • Christina Schwalbe: Change of Media, Change of Scholarship, Change of University: Transition from the Graphosphere to a Digital Mediosphere;
  • Noora Sopula & Joni Leimu: A Classroom 2.0 Experiment;
  • Stefan Sonvilla-Weiss: Communication Techniques, Practices and Strategies of Generation "Web n+1";
  • Wey-Han Tan: Playing (with) Educational Games - Integrated Game Design and Second Order Gaming;
  • Tere Vadén interviewed by Juha Varto: Tepidity of the Majority and Participatory Creativity;
  • Glossary;
  • About the Authors

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Job for Researcher/Senior Researcher on Social Media and Web Science

Research Assistant/Associate

Knowledge Media Institute (KMi)
£27,319 - £35,646, Ref: 6375
Based in Milton Keynes
Temporary contract until 30 June 2012

KMi has an opening for a Research Assistant/Associate (depending on experience and qualifications) to undertake research on Social Semantic Web and Web Science in the context of the EU-funded project WeGov. WeGov aims at developing a toolset that interacts with common social networking systems (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube) to better track and understand the opinions and behaviour of citizens during governance and policy-making processes. The tools will allow discussions on these social networking systems to be linked, seeded, and stimulated through injection of policy discussion points into relevant communities.

You should have a strong interest and expertise in Social Media and Software, Semantic Web, and Web Science and holds a degree in Computer Science or in other relevant disciplines. You must be able to combine scientific research with practical research and development in the project, and are willing to travel and work with the project’s academic and industrial partners.

For detailed information and how to apply go to http://kmi.open.ac.uk/jobs/vacancy-6375.php, call the KMi Recruitment Coordinator on +44 (0) 1908 654774 or email quoting the reference number. Closing date: 6th May 2010.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

ECML PKDD Workshop on Dynamic Networks and Knowledge Discovery (DyNaK 2010)

Call for Papers:

Workshop on Dynamic Networks and Knowledge Discovery
(DyNaK 2010)
co-located with ECML PKDD 2010, September 24, 2010, Barcelona, Spain
http://kdd.di.unito.it/DyNaK2010/


Aim and Scope
Modeling and analyzing networks is a major emerging topic in different research areas, such as computational biology, social science, document retrieval, etc. By connecting objects, it is possible to obtain an intuitive and global view of the relationships between components of a complex system.

Nowadays, the scientific communities have access to huge volumes of network- structured data, such as social networks, gene/proteins/metabolic networks, sensor networks, peer-to-peer networks. Most often, these data are not only static, but they are collected at different time points. This dynamic view of the system allows the time component to play a key role in the comprehension of the evolutionary behavior of the network (evolution of the network structure and/or of flows within the system). Time can help to determine the real causal relationships within, for instance, gene activations, link creation, information flow.

Handling such data is a major challenge for current research in machine learning and data mining, and it has led to the development of recent innovative techniques that consider complex/multi-level networks, time-evolving graphs, heterogeneous information (nodes and links), and requires scalable algorithms that are able to manage huge and complex networks.

DyNaK workshop is motivated by the interest of providing a meeting point for scientists with different backgrounds that are interested in the study of large complex networks and the dynamic aspects of such networks. It aims at attracting contributions from both aspects of networks analysis: large real network analysis and modelling, and knowledge discovery within those networks. Even though each type of real complex networks has some peculiarities related to its specific domain, many aspects of the modeling and mining techniques for such networks are shareable. For instance, gene networks and social networks share a common architecture (scale-free), and involve similar data mining and machine learning methods: module/community extraction, hub single-out, information-flow analysis, missing link detection and link prediction.

Special session on Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining
Every day, millions of people write their opinions about any issue in social media, such as social news sites, review sites, and blogs. The distillation of knowledge from this huge amount of unstructured information is a challenging task. Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining are two areas related to Natural Language Processing and Text Mining that deal with the identification of
opinions and attitudes in natural language texts. In the Opinion Mining session of DyNaK we are interested in research results from academics and practitioners in the task of extracting knowledge from user generated contents, and how time affects to this analysis.

Topics of interest
Contributions to the DyNaK workshop should be focused on this (non exhaustive) list of topics:

Methods:
* Network inference from raw data
* Graphical models
* Graph mining algorithms
* Graph kernel algorithms
* Relational learning algorithms
* Matrix/Tensor methods
* Information retrieval algorithms
* Bayesian methods
* Evolutionary clustering
* Mining and learning from heterogenous domains
* Bisociative information discovery
* Clustering/Co-clustering/Biclustering
* Pattern mining and clustering with constraints
* Community detection/Module extraction
* Analogies between social and biological networks
* Opinion Extraction and Classification
* Blogs Analysis and Social Search
* Temporal Sentiment Analysis
* Irony and Plagiarism detection in Opinion Mining
* Recommender Systems

Applications:
* System biology: regulatory gene networks, protein-protein interaction, miRNA networks, metabolic networks
* Social networks: folksonomies, digital libraries, information networks, social media, collaborative networks
* Sensor networks, peer-to-peer networks, Web, agent networks, body sensor networks

Key Dates
* Paper Submission due: June 21, 2010
* Notification of Acceptance: July 12, 2010
* Camera Ready Papers due: July 21, 2010
* Workshop: September 24, 2010

Organization
* Ruggero G. Pensa, University of Torino, Italy
pensa@di.unito.it

* Francesca Cordero, University of Torino, Italy
fcordero@di.unito.it

* Céline Rouveirol, University of Paris Nord, France
celine.rouveirol@lipn.univ-paris13.fr

* Rushed Kanawati, University of Paris Nord, France
rushed.kanawati@lipn.univ-paris13.fr

* José A. Troyano, University of Sevilla, Spain
troyano@us.es

* Paolo Rosso, Technical University of Valencia, Spain
prosso@dsic.upv.es

Program Committee
* Riccardo Bellazzi, University of Pavia, Italy
* Guillaume Beslon, INSA-Lyon, France
* Bettina Berendt, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
* Tanya Berger-Wolf, University of Illinois, USA
* Karsten M. Borgwardt, MPI, Tübingen, Germany
* Jean-François Boulicaut, INSA-Lyon, France
* Raffaele Calogero, University of Torino, Italy
* Iván Cantador, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain.
* Francisco M. Carrero, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain
* José C. Cortizo, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Spain
* Diego Di Bernardo, TIGEM, Italy
* Mohamed Elati, University of Evry, France
* Paolo Frasconi, University of Firenze, Italy
* Lise Getoor, University of Maryland, USA
* Tamara G. Kolda, Sandia National Laboratories, USA
* Stefan Kramer, Technische Universität München, Germany
* Tao Li, Florida International University, USA
* Pietro Liò, University of Cambridge, UK
* Huan Liu, Arizona State University, USA
* Eric Yu-En Lu, University of Cambridge, UK
* Sara C. Madeira, INESC-ID/IST, Portugal
* Rosa Meo, University of Torino, Italy
* Tsuyoshi Murata, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
* Mirco Nanni, ISTI-CNR, Italy
* Arlindo Oliveira, INESC-ID, Portugal
* Andrea Passerini, University of Trento, Italy
* Lorenza Saitta, University of Piemonte Orientale, Italy
* Rossano Schifanella, University of Torino, Italy
* Einoshin Suzuki, Kyushu University, Japan
* Hanghang Tong, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Invited Speakers
----------------
* Tanya Berger-Wolf, University of Illinois, USA
* Stefan Kramer, Technische Universität München, Germany
* Antònia Martí, University of Barcelona, Spain

Paper Submission
----------------
We welcome original contributions, either theoretical or empirical, describing ongoing projects or completed work (even partially published). The instructions for authors and the LaTeX packages can be found at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. Paper length should not exceed 12 pages. A selection of the accepted papers will be taken into consideration for a special issue of an international journal.

The instructions for paper submission will be available at
http://kdd.di.unito.it/DyNaK2010/.

Friday, April 16, 2010

Utilization of XMPP in ROLE

Within the context of the European FP7 Integrating Project ROLE (Responsive Open Learning Environments), Dr. Ralf Klamma and Dipl.-Inform. Dominik Renzel invited the ROLE project partners to the workshop "Utilization of XMPP in ROLE" with a focus on using the XMPP protocol as key interoperability technology for today's Personal Learning Environments (PLE). After a detailed introduction of the protocol by I5 members, the workshop participants will storm for new application scenarios involving XMPP and set the roadmap for further work. The workshop takes place today.

We will put the slides on slideshare later.