News Archives

Summer school on inverse problems and statistics in high dimension

After the successful PASCAL workshop in 2005 on inverse problems in Toulouse (see http://idei.fr/doc/conf/wip/programme.pdf), we are pleased to announce a summer school on inverse problems and statistics in high dimension:

*Stats in the chateau*
http://www.hec.fr/statsinthechateau

The focus is less on learning and more on statistics and econometrics, but it could be interesting for some of you. Two members of the organizing committee (Sacha Tsybakov and myself) belong to PASCAL.

It will be held in a charming castle in the south of Paris, from August 31 to September 4, 2009.

Registration is only 550 euros, including gourmet meals and accomodation!

If you would like to register, please do so as soon as possible as spaces are getting filled up very quickly.

Researcher positions at NCSR “Demokritos”, Athens, Greece

The Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications of NCSR “Demokritos” is looking for outstanding researchers.

For more information, please refer to:
http://www.cra.org/ads/adtext/ads4990679f1d9e7.php

The Institute has a strong focus on Artificial and Computational Intelligence.

CFP: IJCAI Workshop TextLink 2009

————————————————————-
Call for papers TextLink 2009

The IJCAI-09 Workshop on Text-Mining & Link-Analysis
http://kt.ijs.si/dunja/TextLink2009/

Submission due March 15, 2009

Submissions should be sent in electronic form as a PDF file,
To: marko.grobelnik (at) ijs.si.
Subject: TextLink-2009 Workshop submission

————————————————————-
The workshop aims to focus the intersection of the two still increasingly important areas of analytic research: Text-Mining and Link-Analysis. Both areas deal with so-called unstructured data representations like text and graphs sharing many similar characteristics in the context of analysis. Although both areas are very much related in the technical and the historical sense there has not been almost any events so far addressing explicitly the common problems and techniques. Therefore, the aim of the workshop is to attract the scientists in the both areas resulting in getting better insights in the work of each other and potentially new ideas for future research.
Link-Analysis is an area, which developed in the last 20 years in various fields as Social Sciences (Social-Network-Analysis), Mathematics (Graph-Theory), and Computer-Science (graph as a data-structure). Recently the area got much bigger attention, especially in Data Mining / KDD community because of its wide applicability in the areas as law enforcement investigations (e.g.,
terrorism), fraud detection (e.g., insurance, banking), web analytics (e.g., search engines, web marketing), telecommunications (e.g. routers, traffic, connectivity).
Text-Mining area is receiving in the last 6 years growing attention mainly because of the availability of large text corpora in the electronic form and because there is lack of “intelligent” tools and techniques for solving different difficult problems appearing on the market like: information extraction, text categorization, ontology building, visualization, intelligent search, etc.
On the intersection of both fields there are many interesting problems and issues out of which both fields can benefit. Just to name some of the potential problem and application areas: trend analysis, community identification, web user profiling, media clipping, marketing, etc. The intersection of both areas also includes ideas as for instance representing text with the graph structure (which got popular in the social-networks area recently) and analytic procedures for discovering various pieces of knowledge using that kind of alternative representations. In particular, currently “hot” areas of research and applications are analysis of dynamic (evolving) datasets including text and link structure, emerging semantics from electronic social structures (blogs, emails, folksonomies, social bookmarking, Wikipedia etc.)
The broader context of the workshop can be related in some respect to the areas of Data-Mining, Machine-Learning, Semantic-Web, Information Retrieval, Natural-Language-Processing, Social-Networks-Analysis and general Graph-Theory.
Particular topics of interest for the workshop include but are not limited to:
* Link-Analysis / Social Networks Analysis
* Text-Mining / Language technologies
* Web-Mining
* Semantic-Web
* Emerging Semantics / Folksonomies
* Information-Extraction
* Scalability of developed approaches
* Visualization of text and link structures
* Performance evaluation measures
* Dynamic Networks
* Visualization / HCI
* Innovative applications

Submissions should be sent by March 15, 2009, in electronic form as a PDF file, to
marko.grobelnik (at ) ijs.si. Please ensure you include the following text in your email subject: “TextLink-2009 Workshop submission”. Submissions should be formatted according to IJCAI-09 Workshop Procedures. The reviews will not be blind so authors should include their full contact information in the papers. Submitted papers will be reviewed by referees from the Program Committee.
Accepted papers will be published in the Workshop proceedings.
Notification of acceptance and rejection will be sent by April 17, 2009.
Submission Deadline: March 15, 2009
Acceptance Notification: April 17, 2009
Camera-ready Copies: April 30, 2009
Workshop date: July 11-13, 2009

Attendance is not limited to the paper authors. The workshop should be interesting primarily for researchers, students and company people working in the research and application areas dealing with various aspects of data analysis and rich data & knowledge representations.
We expect that, the workshop will attract people from the areas and sub areas of:
* Academic Data-Mining (analytical aspects of dealing with text and link structures, dynamic networks)
* Commercial Data-Mining (new application areas, such as blog analysis, trend detection etc.)
* Natural-Language-Processing (representational aspects)
* Social-Networks-Analysis (algorithmic aspects of dealing with large network structures)
* Semantic-Web (especially emerging semantics coming out of bottom-up collaborative efforts e.g. folksonomies)

Our assumption is that the topic will attract people already being present at the IJCAI and being interested in Data-Mining, Machine-Learning and Natural-Language-Processing. We expect that there might be also some additional participants just because of the workshop topics from Social-Network-Analysis area which otherwise would not come to the IJCAI.

Program Chairs
Marko Grobelnik
J.Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
Jure Leskovec
Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
Natasa Milic-Frayling
Microsoft Research Ltd, 7 J J Thomson Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 0FB, United Kingdom
Dunja Mladenic
J.Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Call for Papers – VAKD ’09

ACM SIGKDD WORKSHOP ON VISUAL ANALYTICS AND KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY:
INTEGRATING AUTOMATED ANALYSIS WITH INTERACTIVE EXPLORATION

A full-day workshop in conjunction with the 15th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Paris, France, on 28 June 2009.
Submit papers by 20 April 2009.

http://www.hiit.fi/vakd09

The goal of Visual Analytics is to derive insight from massive, dynamic, ambiguous, and often conflicting data; detect the expected and discover the unexpected; provide timely, defensible, and
understandable assessments; and communicate the assessment effectively for action. The goal of this workshop is to raise the awareness of the KDD community for the importance of Visual Analytics and bring together researcher from the underlying fields to bridge the gap between them – to write a KDD research roadmap on Visual Analytics.

Topics of Interest

We solicit papers that will introduce new research results, present
forward-looking positional statements, or define relevant research
challenges. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Visual and interactive data analysis
* Visual support in the knowledge discovery process
* Statistical graphics for data analysis
* Geo-spatial Visual Analytics
* Collaborative Visual Analytics
* Scalable Visual Analytics
* Visual data abstraction
* Visual analysis of large graphs and networks
* Visual exploration of data warehouses
* Integrated visualization of raw data and analysis results
* Metrics and evaluation methods for Visual Analytics
* Perceptual and cognitive factors in Visual Analytics
* Interaction paradigms and human factors

Visual Analytics Challenge

You are invited to work the IEEE VAST 2008 challenges, and use those datasets, to illustrate your KDD/VA research. A distinct advantage to you in using these datasets is that we will be able to compare and contrast approaches taken by the Visual Analytics community with yours and examine the possibilities for synergies between the two communities. We will present examples of the VAST 2008 challenge solutions at the workshop, as a springboard to follow-on discussion.

Invites Speakers

Rakesh Agrawal (Search Labs, Microsoft Research)
Jim Thomas (National Visualization and Analytics Center, Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory)

Program Committee Chairs

Fosca Giannotti & Dino Pedreschi & Salvatore Rinzivillo (University of Pisa)
Georges Grinstein (University of Massachusetts Lowell)
Otto Huisman (International Institute of Geo-Information Science and
Earth Observation)
Daniel A. Keim (University of Konstanz)
Catherine Plaisant (Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland)
Tobias Schreck (Technische Universitaet Darmstadt)
Mike Sips (Max-Planck-Institut fuer Informatik)
Dimitrios Tzovaras (Center for Research & Technology Hellas)
Anders Ynnerman & Jimmy Johansson (Linköping University)

Challenge Chairs

Mark A. Whiting & Jean Scholtz (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)

General Chairs

Kai Puolamäki & Heikki Mannila (Helsinki Institute for Information
Technology HIIT)
Alessio Bertone & Silvia Miksch (Danube University Krems)

Contact Information

Email: vakd09@hiit.fi
Web site: http://www.hiit.fi/vakd09
See the workshop web site for complete contact information.

Sponsors

VisMaster, a European FP7 Coordination Action Project focused on
Visual Analytics
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT
Danube University Krems, Departement of Information and Knowledge
Engineering (DUK)
National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC)

Important Dates
20 April 2009 Paper/challenge submissions
28 June 2009 Workshop in Paris, France

Please see the full Call for Papers at
www.hiit.fi/vakd09

KDD cup 2009

KDD cup 2009: fast scoring on a large database

http://www.kddcup-orange.com/

10000 Euros in prizes!

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a key element of modern marketing strategies. The KDD Cup 2009 offers the opportunity to work on large marketing databases from the French Telecom company Orange to predict the propensity of customers to switch provider (churn), buy new products or services (appetency), or buy upgrades or add-ons proposed to them to make the sale more profitable (up-selling). The challenge is to beat the in-house system developed by Orange Labs. It is an opportunity to prove that you can deal with a very large database, including heterogeneous noisy data (numerical and categorical variables), and unbalanced class distri butions. Time efficiency is often a crucial point. Therefore part of the competition will be time-constrained to test the ability of the participants to deliver solutions quickly.

Key dates:
March 10, 2009 — fast challenge opens
April 10, 2009 — deadline of the fast challenge
May 11, 2009 — challenge ends

Chicago Summer School/Workshop on Theory and Practice of Computational Learning

Dear Everyone,

We would like to remind you about the upcoming Machine Learning Summer School and Workshop on Theory and Practice of Computational Learning in Chicago. As you recall, the summer school workshop will be held from June 1 to June 11 at the University of Chicago. At this point we would like to ask you to let your students, colleagues and anyone else who may be interested know about this event. In particular, we think that the summer school will be a great opportunity for graduate students and researchers from other fields to be introduced to a broad range of subjects in data analysis, machine learning, geometry of data and applications, while the workshops will let the participants learn about the most recent research in these fields.

The workshop will be held in the afternoon and in the morning there will be a full program of tutorial talks on topics including

Foundations of Statistical Learning
Kernel Methods and Support Vector Machines
Semi-supervised and Active Learning
Boosting and Ensemble methods
Compressed Sensing and Sparse representations
Manifold Methods and Geometry of Point Clouds
Graphical Models
Machine Learning in Computer Vision, Speech, Text and Natural Language Processing
Learning in Neuroscience and Human-Computer Interaction

More information is available at http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/mlss09/
The flier can be downloaded from http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/mlss09/mlss.pdf

Call for Papers: ISDA’2009

===============================================================

CALL FOR PAPERS

ISDA 2009
9th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and
Applications
http://cig.iet.unipi.it/isda09/
PISA, ITALY
November 30 – December 2, 2009
===============================================================

AIMS AND SCOPE
The International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA) is a major annual international conference to bring together researchers, engineers, developers and practitioners from academia and industry working in all interdisciplinary areas of computational intelligence and system engineering to share their experience, and exchange and cross-fertilize their ideas.
Following the big success of the previous editions, ISDA’09, which is the ninth edition of ISDA, serves as a forum for the dissemination of state-of-the-art research, development, and implementations of intelligent systems, intelligent technologies and useful applications in these two fields.

ISDA’09 is sponsored by:
IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society (IEEE – SMC)
International Fuzzy Systems Association (IFSA)
European Neural Network Society (ENNS)
European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology (EUSFLAT) (pending
approval)
Machine Intelligence Research Labs (MIRLab)
University of Granada
University of Pisa
University of Salerno

TOPICS
Topics of interests include (but are not limited to):
A. Intelligent Systems Architectures and Applications
B. Intelligent Image and Signal Processing
C. Intelligent Internet Modeling
D. Intelligent Data Mining
E. Intelligent Business Systems
F. Intelligent Control and Automation
G. Intelligent Agents
H. Intelligent Knowledge Management
I. Innovative Information Security
J. Innovative Networking and Communication Techniques
K. Web Intelligence

A detailed list can be found at:
http://cig.iet.unipi.it/isda09/index.php/topic.html

INVITED PLENARY SPEAKERS
Piero Bonnissone (General Electric, USA)
Carlos A. Coello Coello (CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico)
Hani Hagras (University of Essex, United Kingdom)
Hisaho Ishibuchi (Osaka Prefecture University, Japan)
Witold Pedrycz (University of Alberta, Canada)

SUBMISSIONS
Prospective authors are invited to submit a full paper of 4-6 pages (PDF). Authors must follow the double column IEEE 8.5 two-column format. Papers should contain up to 5 keywords. Papers will be evaluated for originality, significance, clarity and soundness, and will be reviewed by at least three independent reviewers. Accepted papers will be published by IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY PRESS. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their contribution for
possible inclusion in special issues of a selection of international journals.
The Program Committee will select two winners for the Best Paper Award (all regular papers are eligible) and two winners for the Best Student Paper Award (to be eligible, the student must be the sole author of the paper or the first author and primary contributor).
The award winners (both regular and student papers) will each be presented with an award certificate and a present. It is assumed that all accepted manuscripts will be presented at the conference. All accepted papers must be accompanied by a full paid registration to appearin
the proceedings. All full papers have to be submitted electronically in PDF format via the web site.

WORKSHOP PROPOSAL
Proposals for holding workshops that will complement the main conference are solicited from interested individuals (or group of individuals). The workshops should fall within the scope of ISDA’09, and should include at least 8 related papers. Researchers and practitioners wishing to organize workshops should submit proposals in plain text or pdf- format. Proposals should be written explicitly with the following information:
– Workshop Title
– Duration of the Workshop
– A Technical Description of the Workshop Topic area
– A Brief Statement of the Relevance of the proposed Workshop to ISDA’09
– Composition of the Organizing Committee
The proposals will be evaluated by the Workshop Chair of ISDA’09. The information about the accepted workshops will be included in the IDSA’09 web site as well as links to the call for papers and call for participation. Please submit your proposals to the
workshop chair, Jose Manuel Benitez Sanchez, at J.M.Benitez (at) decsai.ugr.es.

SPECIAL SESSION PROPOSAL
The ISDA’09 invites proposals for special sessions to be held in conjunction with the Conference. Special sessions provide organizers and participants with an opportunity to concentrate on focused topics related to the conference. A minimum of 4 papers is required for each special session. All accepted papers will be included in the ISDA’09 conference proceedings. It is expected that organizers will be chairing their special sessions in ISDA’09. Special session proposals should contain the necessary information to judge the importance, quality and community interest in the proposed topic. Each special session should have one or more designated organizers.
Special session proposals should address the following issues:
– Topic of interest:
Provide a full description of the proposed special session. What will the special session be about? Why should we believe this is an interesting and significant topic?
– Organizers’ biography: Please indicate the background of the organizer(s).

Once a special session proposal has been approved it will be immediately announced on the website. Organizers are also expected to help promoting the special sessions by their own means.
Please submit your proposals to the special session chair, Dr. Sabrina Senatore, at
ssenatore (at) unisa.it

IMPORTANT DATES
Deadline for workshop and session proposal April 15, 2009
Workshop and session proposal acceptance April 30, 2009
Deadline for paper submission May 31, 2009
Notification of acceptance July 25, 2009
Camera-ready manuscript submission September 15, 2009

GENERAL CHAIRS
Beatrice Lazzerini (University of Pisa, Italy)
Lakhmi Jain (University of South Australia, Australia)
Ajith Abraham (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway)

TECHNICAL PROGRAM COMMITTEE CHAIRS
Francesco Marcelloni (University of Pisa, Italy)
Francisco Herrera (University of Granada, Spain)
Vincenzo Loia (University of Salerno, Italy)

STEERING COMMITTEE
Ajith Abraham (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway)
Janos Abonyi (University of Veszprem, Hungary)
Yuehui Chen (Jinan University, China)
Lakhmi Jain (University of South Australia, Australia)
Janusz Kacprzyk (Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland)
Etienne Kerre (Ghent University, Belgium)
Halina Kwasnicka (Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland)
Nadia Nedjah (State University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Jeng-Shyang Pan (National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences, Taiwan)
Marcin Paprzycki (SWPS, Poland)
Paramasivan Saratchandran (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

ADVISORY BOARD
Christian Borgelt (European Centre for Soft Computing, Spain)
Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier (CNRS, France)
Stefano Cagnoni (University of Parma, Italy)
Oscar Cordon (European Centre for Soft Computing, Spain)
Bernard de Baets (Ghent University, Belgium)
Enrique Herrera Viedma (University of Granada, Spain)
Mario Köppen (Kyushu Institute of Technology, Japan)
Chang-Shing Lee (National University of Tainan, Taiwan)
Trevor Martin (University of Bristol, United Kingdom)
Nikhil R. Pal (Indian Statistical Institute, India)
Vincenzo Piuri (University of Milan, Italy)
Hideyuki Takagi (Kyushu University, Japan)
Domenico Talia (University of Calabria, Italy)
Ronald R. Yager (Iona College, USA)
Albert Zomaya (University of Sydney, Australia)

INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMME COMMITTEE (to be extended)
Akshai Aggarwal (University of Winsor, Canada)
Bruno Apolloni (University of Milan, Italy)
Adil Baykasoglu (University of Gaziantep, Turkey)
Ester Bernado (University of Ramon Llull, Spain)
Andrea Bonarini (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
Piero Bonissone (General Electric, USA)
Abdelhamid Bouchachia (Alps-Adriatic University of Klagenfurt, Austria)
Alberto Bugarín (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain)
Humberto Bustince (Public University of Navarra, Spain)
Oscar Castillo (HAFSA, Mexico)
Yuehui Chen (Jinan University, China)
Sung-Bae Cho (Yonsei University, Korea)
Mario G.C.A. Cimino (University of Pisa, Italy)
Marco Cococcioni (University of Pisa, Italy)
Carlos Artemio Coello Coello (CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico)
Emilio Corchado (University of Burgos, Spain)
Ernesto Damiani (University of Milan, Italy)
Andre de Carvalho (University of São Paulo, Brazil)
Martine De Cock (Ghent University, Belgium)
José Valente de Oliveira (University of Algarve, Portugal)
María José del Jesus (University of Jaen, Spain)
Abraham Duarte (University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)
Wilfried Elmenreich (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)
Anna Maria Fanelli (University of Bari, Italy)
Jose Antonio Gámez (University of Castilla la Mancha, Spain)
Xiao-Zhi Gao (Institute of Intelligent Power Electronics, Finland)
José Luís García-Lapresta (University of Valladolid, Spain)
Nicolás García-Pedrajas (University of Cordoba, Spain)
Raul Giraldez (University Pablo Olavide, Spain)
Fernando Gomide (DCA-FEEC-UNICAMP, Brazil)
Crina Grosan (Babes-Bolyai University, Romania)
Jerzy Grzymala-Busse (University of Kansas, USA)
Hani Hagras (University of Essex, UK)
Cesar Hervás (University of Córdoba, Spain)
Tzung-Pei Hong (National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan)
Pedro Isasi (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
Hisaho Ishibuchi (Osaka Prefecture University, Japan)
Frank Klawonn (University of Applied Sciences Braunschweig/Wolfenbuettel,
Germany)
Andreas König (TU Kaiserslautern, Germany)
Jonathan Lee (National Central University, Taiwan)
Chia-Chen Lin (Providence University, Taiwan)
Paul P. Lin (Cleveland State University, USA)
Jose Antonio Lozano (Universidad del País Vasco, Spain)
Teresa B. Ludermir (Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil)
Urszula Markowska-Kaczmar (Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland)
Francesco Masulli (University of Genova, Italy)
Lahcéne Mitiche (University of Djelfa, Algeria)
Roman Neruda (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic)
Seppo J. Ovaska (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland)
Marcin Paprzycki (Polish Academy of Science, Poland)
Witold Pedrycz (University of Alberta, Canada)
José María Peña (Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain)
Petr Posik (Czech Technical University, Czech Republic)
Dilip Pratihar (Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India)
Germano Resconi (Catholic University, Italy)
José Riquelme (University of Sevilla, Spain)
Ignacio Rojas (University of Granada, Spain)
Ovidio Salvetti (ISTI-CNR, Italy)
Elie Sanchez (CNRS, France)
Luciano Sánchez (University of Oviedo, Spain)
Andrea Schaerf (University of Udine, Italy)
Giovanni Semeraro (University of Bari, Italy)
Georgios Ch. Sirakoulis (Democritus University of Thrace, Greece)
Luciano Stefanini (University of Urbino, Italy)
Carlo Tasso (University of Udine, Italy)
Ayeley Tchangani (Universite Toulouse III, France)
Michael N. Vrahatis (University of Patras, Greece)
Gregg Vesonder (Executive Director and AT&T Fellow, USA)
Shyue-Liang Wang (National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan)
Fatos Xhafa (Universtat Politécnica de Catalunya, Spain)

ECML-PKDD 2009: call for tutorials

The ECML-PKDD 2009 Organizing Committee invites proposals for tutorials to be held on the first and the last day of the conference, which will take place in Bled, Slovenia, on September 7-11, 2009.
Tutorials are free of charge to the conference attendees.

We seek proposals for half-day tutorials on core techniques and emerging research topics that enjoy broad interest within the machine learning and the data mining community. We also welcome tutorials from related research fields or exciting application areas. Tutorials should attract a wide audience. They should be broad enough to provide a gentle introduction to the chosen research area and they should highlight the current challenges. The ideal tutorial should also cover the most important contributions in sufficient depth and discuss future research directions. Proposals that exclusively focus on the presenters’ own work are not eligible.

Guidelines for preparing a proposal can be found at:
http://www.ecmlpkdd2009.net/calls/call-for-tutorials/

Tutorial proposals should be submitted via email in PDF format to the ECML-PKDD 2009 tutorial chair (ecml-pkdd-tu (at) cs.ucl.ac.uk). Proposers should expect to receive a verification of receipt soon after submission.

The timeline is as follows:

Tutorial proposals due: March 8, 2009
Acceptance notification: March 25, 2009
Tutorial material due: August 15, 2009
Tutorials date: September 7 and 11, 2009

I hope to see you at the tutorials.

Cedric Archambeau
Tutorials Chair ECML-PKDD 2009

Grid@CLEF 2009 – New CLEF 2009 Pilot Track

Grid@CLEF is an activity of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF), which is launching a new pilot track in the CLEF 2009 campaign. Information about the objectives, the task, the organization, and the subscription procedure follows; for more information and updates, please visit the Grid@CLEF Web site at:

http://ims.dei.unipd.it/gridclef/

*Objectives*

Multilingual information access (MLIA) is increasingly part of many complex systems, such as digital libraries, intranet and enterprise portals, Web search engines.

The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) research community has been outstanding and very active in designing, developing, and testing MLIA methods and techniques, constantly improving the performances of such components. But is this enough? Do we really know how MLIA components (stop lists, stemmers, IR models, relevance feedback, translation techniques, etc.) behave with respect to languages? Do we have a deep comprehension of how these components interact together when the language changes?
Unfortunately, today’s picture is quite fragmentary since researchers have mainly focused on specific aspects of multilinguality but a comprehensive and unifying view is still missing. This situation prevents an easy adoption of MLIA techniques and technology transfer by relevant application and developer communities. Indeed, it is often difficult for people outside the IR community to extract from the specialised scientific literature indications about the most promising
approaches and solutions.

We are thus launching a cooperative effort where a series of large-scale and systematic grid experiments will allow us to to improve our comprehension of MLIA systems and gain an exhaustive picture of their behaviour with respect to languages. In this way, we can exploit the
valuable resources and experimental collections made available by CLEF over the years in order to gain more insights about the effectiveness of the various weighting schemes and retrieval techniques with respect to the languages and to disseminate this knowledge to the relevant
application and developer communities.

*Task*

This first year task focuses on *monolingual retrieval*, i.e. querying topics against documents in the same language of the topics, *in five European languages*:

* Dutch;
* English;
* French;
* German;
* Italian.

The selected languages will allow participants to test both romance and germanic languages, as well as languages with word compounding issues. Moreover, these languages have been extensively studied in the MLIA field and, therefore, it will be possible to compare and assess the
outcomes of the first year experiments with respect to the existing literature.

The reference scenario for Grid@CLEF 2009 concerns an IR system which consists of:

– a tokenizer component for processing the input document collection and producing a stream of tokens;
– an optional stop list component for removing stop words form the stream of tokens;
– an optional word decompounder component for splitting compound words in the stream of tokens;
– an optional stemmer component for stemming words in the stream of tokens;
– a weighting/scoring engine component for scoring documents against queries and producing an output ranked list.

Instead of directly feeding the next component, as usually happens in a monolithic IR system, the Grid@CLEF task requires each component to input and output from/to XML files in a well-defined format. This choice allows the exchange of these XML files among participants and the creation of a whole experiment from the chaining of components that may belong to different IR systems.

Therefore, the Grid@CLEF 2009 track has a twofold goal:

1. to prepare participants’ systems to work according to this new framework based on the exchange of well-defined XML messages;
2. to conduct as many experiments as possible, i.e. to put as many dots as possible on the grid, according to this new framework.

To facilitate the participation in this first year task, participants are required to participate in what we call the *island mode*, where all the components which constitute the IR system of the reference scenario are developed and run by the same participant. The participant is only requested to implement the XML messaging format for each of his own components and publish all the intermediate results of these components on the online XML messaging exchange system.

*Participanting in the Grid@CLEF 2009 pilot track is easy: you only need to join the island mode and produce as many experiments as possible.*

*Schedule*

The tentative schedule for the Grid@CLEF 2009 track is as follows:

* Topics and collections release: early March 2009;
* XML messaging framework specification release: early April 2009;
* XML messaging exchange online system release: early May 2009;
* Experiment submission: mid June 2009;
* Results computation: early July 2009;
* Working note papers: mid August 2009;
* CLEF 2009 Workshop: from 30 September to 2 October 2009 in Corfu,
Greece.

*Track Coordinators*

* Nicola Ferro, University of Padua, Italy – ferro (at) dei.unipd.it
* Donna Harman, National Institute of Standards and Technology
(NIST), USA – donna.harman (at) nist.gov

*Advisory Committee*

* Chris Buckley, Sabir Research, USA;
* Fredric Gey, University of California at Berkeley, USA;
* Kalervo Javelin, University of Tampere, Finland;
* Noriko Kando, National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan;
* Craig Macdonald, University of Glasgow, UK;
* Prasenjit Majumder, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India;
* Paul McNamee, Johns Hopkins University, USA;
* Teruko Mitamura, Carnegie Mellon University, USA;
* Mandar Mitra, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India;
* Stephen Robertson, Microsoft Research Cambridge and City University London, UK;
* Jacques Savoy, University of Neuchael, Switzerland.

*Subscriptions*

Registration for CLEF 2009 and subscription to the Grid@CLEF 2009 pilot track open *4 February*. You can find more information on the main CLEF Web site at:

http://www.clef-campaign.org/

under “CLEF 2009”.

KDD’09 Call for Applications Papers

=================================================================

KDD-2009: The Fifteenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD’09)

Paris, France
June 28 – July 1, 2009.

http://www.kdd.org/kdd2009/

CALL FOR Industrial/Government Applications Papers

==================================================================

The Industrial/Government Applications Track of the 15th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
(KDD-2009) will highlight challenges, lessons, research issues and practical problems arising out of deploying applications of KDD technology.
The focus is on promoting the exchange of ideas between researchers and practitioners of data mining.

=================
Important dates:
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***Note the earlier submission deadlines***
Abstract submission: February 2, 2009
Paper submission: February 6, 2009
Notification: April 10, 2009
Conference dates: June 28 – July 1, 2009

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The KDD-2009 Industrial/Government Applications (I/G) Track seeks to:

* provide a forum for exchanging ideas between KDD practitioners,
researchers, companies, and government organizations;
* help commercial and government organizations highlight successful
KDD applications;
* raise interesting industrial challenges and other concerns more
specific to industry and government and exchange ideas about how
recent research development could help and bring solutions for
typical issues include but are not limited to customer privacy issues,

analysis of data not generally available in academia, issues of
scale that arise more heavily in a corporate setting, etc.

The I/G Applications Track solicits papers describing implementations of KDD solutions relevant to commercial or government settings. The primary emphasis is on papers that advance our understanding of practical, applied, or pragmatic issues and highlight new research challenges in real KDD applications. Applications can be in any field including, but not limited to: e-commerce, medical and pharmaceutical, defense, public policy, engineering, manufacturing, telecommunications, banking, insurance, finance, and government. Being held in Europe for the first time, we enthusiastically seek contributions from European authors and on European projects.

The I/G Applications Track will consist of competitively-selected contributed papers – presented in oral and/or poster form – as well as invited talks. We envision submissions along four sub-areas:

* Emerging applications and technology
* Deployed KDD case studies
* Comparative studies of KDD technology
* Pragmatic issues and research considerations in fielding real applications.

Emerging application and technology papers discuss prototype applications, tools for focused domains or tasks, useful techniques or methods, useful system architectures, scalability enablers, tool evaluations, or integration of KDD and other technologies. Case studies describe deployed projects with measurable benefits that include KDD technology. Such papers need to demonstrate the importance and general impact of the work clearly.
Comparative studies compare and contrast KDD technologies using specific examples (without being a product advertisement). Pragmatic issues and considerations include important practical and research considerations, approaches, and architectures that enable successful applications.

Submitters are encouraged (but not required) to select one (or more) of these sub-areas for their papers. In their submission, authors are required to explain why the application is important, the specific need for KDD technology to solve the problem (including why other methods perhaps not based on data mining may fall short), and any innovations or lessons learned in the solution.

KDD 2009 will also feature keynote presentations, a research track, workshops, tutorials, and the KDD Cup competition.

I/G Applications Track Co-Chairs:

* Kamal Ali, ISLE/Stanford,
* Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo! Research