Djoerd Hiemstra’s home page

CLEF 2012: Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum: First Call for Participation

The CLEF 2012 is next year’s edition of the popular CLEF campaign and workshop series which has run since 2000 contributing to the systematic evaluation of information access systems, primarily through experimentation on shared tasks. In 2010 CLEF was launched in a new format, as a conference with research presentations, panels, poster and demo sessions and laboratory evaluation workshops. Labs follow under two types: laboratories to conduct evaluation of information access systems, and workshops to discuss and pilot innovative evaluation activities. In 2012, CLEF will take place in September 17-20 in Rome, and researchers and practitioners from all segments of the information access and related communities are invited to participate to the following Evaluation Labs:

• CHiC - Cultural Heritage in CLEF
• CLEF-IP - Informaton Retrieval in the Intellectual Property domain
• ImageCLEF - Cross Language Image Retrieval
• INEX - INitiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval
• PAN - Uncovering Plagiarism, Authorship, and Social Software Misuse
• QA4MRE - Question Answering for Machine Reading Evaluation
• RepLab 2012 - Online Reputation Management
• CLEFeHealth - Electronic Health

More information at: http://clef2012.org/

On February 23rd and 24th 2012, the “12th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop” (DIR 2012) will be organised at the Ghent University conference center Het Pand. One of the primary goals of this year’s edition of DIR is to create an informal meeting place between the major IR research groups and related companies in Belgium and the Netherlands, to exchange information and to present innovative research developments. If your field of expertise is situated in the broad area of Information Retrieval, you are warmly invited to submit a “short paper” (4 pages) containing new research results, or a “compressed contribution” (2 pages) from a recent high-standard conference or journal paper. For companies active in this area, we offer the opportunity to submit demo papers, focusing on novel IR technology and applications. All further information regarding DIR 2012 can be found on http://dir2012.intec.ugent.be/.

Stefano Ceri will give a keynote talk at the DBDBD on 2 December 2011. Ceri is professor of Database Systems at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He co-authored over 250 articles in International Journals and Conference Proceedings, and is co-author or editor of many international books, including best-selling classics like “Conceptual database design: an Entity-relationship approach” with Carlo Batini and Shamkant Navathe. His research interests cover many aspects of database management systems, including distributed databases, deductive and active databases, streaming data, object orientation, XML query languages, as well as design methods for data-intensive web sites.

Professor Ceri was awarded the prestigious IDEAS Advanced Grant, funded by the European Research Council (ERC), on Search Computing (search-computing.it): Search computing enables answering questions via a constellation of dynamically selected, cooperating, search services. Search computing should enable answering complex queries like: “Who are the strongest European competitors on software ideas?”, “Who is the best doctor to cure insomnia in a nearby hospital?”, or very important for poor PhD students, “Where can I attend an interesting conference in my field closest to a sunny beach?”

More information on: dbdbd.nl

Jimmy Lin will give a keynote lecture at the SIKS/BigGrid Big Data tutorial that preceeds the DBDBD on 30 November and 1 December 2011. Dr. Lin, who holds a PhD from MIT, is associate professor in the iSchool at the University of Maryland. He also has appointments in the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and the Department of Computer Science at Maryland. Lin works at the intersection of natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR), with a recent emphasis on scalable algorithm design and large-data issues. He directs the recently-formed Cloud Computing Center, an interdisciplinary group which explores the many aspects of cloud computing as it impacts technology, people, and society. He is also a member of both the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab (CLIP) and the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL). Lin worked on Cloudera, which aims to bring Hadoop MapReduce to the enterprise, and is currently spending a sabbatical at Twitter

See: Big Data Tutorial

This year’s SIGIR best paper award was presented to Mikhail Ageev (Moscow State University), and Qi Guo, Dmitry Lagun, and Eugene Agichtein (Emory University) for their paper Find It If You Can: A Game for Modeling Different Types of Web Search Success Using Interaction Data in which they propose a principled formalization of different types of success for informational search, and a scalable game-like infrastructure for crowdsourcing search behavior studies.

The best student paper award was awarded to Shuang-Hong Yang (Georgia Institute of Technology), Bo Long and Alexander J. Smola (Yahoo! Labs), Hongyuan Zha (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Zhaohui Zheng (Yahoo! Labs Beijing) for their paper Collaborative Competitive Filtering: Learning Recommender using Context of User Choice. The paper proposes Collaborative Competitive Filtering (CCF), a framework for learning user preferences by modeling the choice process in recommender systems.

There were honorable mentions for the papers: Parameterized Concept Weighting in Verbose Queries, Understanding Re-finding Behaviour in Naturalistic Email Interaction Log, Out of sight, not out of mind: On the effect of social and physical detachment on information need, Enhanced Results for Web Search, and Recommending Ephemeral Items at Web Scale.

The Dutch Belgian Database Day (DBDBD) will be in Twente this year on 2 December 2011. The DBDBD is a yearly one-day workshop organized by a Belgian or Dutch university, whose general topic is database research. DBDBD invites submissions (1 page abstract) on a broad range of database and database-related topics, including but not limited to data storage and management, theoretical database issues, database performance, data integration, data mining, data security, and data search.

At the DBDBD, junior researchers from the Netherlands and Belgium can present their recent results, and meet senior researchers in the field of databases. It is an excellent opportunity to meet up with your Belgian/Dutch colleagues, and to get informed about the (recent) database-related research performed in Belgian/Dutch universities. The workshop is also open to non-Belgian/Dutch participants (presentations are in English). The workshop consists of oral presentations. There are no printed proceedings. Abstracts of talks will be published on the workshop’s website.

Keynote speaker at the DBDBD will be prof. Stefano Ceri from Politecnico di Milano, Italy.

See the call for abstracts on the DBDBD 2011 web site.

DIR 2011 will be held on 4 February 2011 at the University of Amsterdam. You are invited to submit contributions to the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop (DIR 2011). The primary aim of DIR is to provide an international meeting place where researchers from the domain of information retrieval and related disciplines can exchange information and present innovative research developments. DIR 2011 will put special emphasis on interaction - by focusing on poster presentations and creating space and time to meet and discuss new ideas.

More information on the DIR 2011 web site.

SIKS/Twente Seminar on Searching and Ranking

Together with SIKS and the CTIT we have organized several one day seminars, usually in conjunction with a PhD defense here in Twente.

• SSR-1: Searching and Ranking in Structured Text Repositories on 27 June 2008, with Debora Donato, and Ricardo Baeza-Yates, both from Yahoo! Research Barcelona
• SSR-2: Searching and Ranking in Enterprises, on 24 June 2009 with David Hawking from Funnelback Internet and Enterprise Search & Australian National University
• SSR-3: Effectiveness of Searching and Ranking on 29 January 2010, with Leif Azzopardi from University of Glasgow, UK, and Vanessa Murdock form Yahoo! Research, Barcelona
• SSR-4: Searching and Ranking Multimedia on 2 July 2010 with Alexander Hauptmann from Carnegie Mellon University, USA.
• SSR-5: Biomedical Text Mining on 1 September 2010 with Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann (European Bioinformatics Institute, UK) and Martijn Schuemie (Erasmus MC/Leiden University Medical Center, Rotterdam)

On 1 September 2010, we organize a small seminar on Biomedical Text Mining at the University of Twente. Invited speakers are:

• Martijn Schuemie (Erasmus MC/LUMC, Rotterdam, Netherlands)
• Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann (European Bioinformatics Institute, UK)

The workshop will take place at the campus of the University of Twente at the small lecture hall of the Vrijhof (building 47). The event is sponsored by the Netherlands research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) and the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT). Please visit the SSR-5 home page for more information.

This year, the Dutch Belgian Database Day (DBDBD) will be held in Hasselt, Belgium, on Monday November 22nd, 2010. DBDBD is a yearly one-day workshop organized in a Belgian or Dutch university, whose general topic is database research. DBDBD invites submissions (1 page abstract) on a broad range of database and database-related topics, including but not limited to data storage and management, theoretical database issues, database performance, data mining, information retrieval, data semantics, querying, ontologies etc. Based on the submissions, the workshop will be organized in different sessions each covering a particular topic.

At the DBDBD, junior researchers from the Netherlands and Belgium can present their recent results. It is an excellent opportunity to meet up with your Belgian/Dutch colleagues, and to get informed about the (recent) database-related research performed in Belgian/Dutch universities. The workshop is also open to non-Belgian/Dutch participants (presentations are in English). Participation is free for all SIKS-members (Phd-students, research fellows, senior research fellows and associated members).

DBDBD 2010 web site