* First Call for Papers *
for
DE-PERsonalisation 2018

A workshop held in conjunction with the 40th European Conference
on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2018)

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You are invited to participate in the upcoming DE-PERsonalisation 2018 workshop, that will be held as part of the 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) (https://www.ecir2018.org).

Important Dates:

* Papers submission: 10 January 2018 (midnight AoE)
* Notification of acceptance: 12 February 2018
* Camera ready submission: 26 February 2018 (midnight AoE)
* DE-PERsonlisation Workshop: 26 March 2018
* ECIR Conference: 26-29 March 2018


Overview:

Personalised search gave users significant control over information overload and an ability to simplify the handling of large content collections, such as the web. On the downside, it has led to situations where people find themselves in confined information spaces where similar ideas, beliefs, or data are preserved and repeatedly reinforced to the extent that users find it difficult to retrieve and experience alternative content and competing views. Echo Chambers create substantial polarisation effects, impeding users' ability to access alternative and diverse information. In search situations, this may disconnect users from others while inside the Echo Chamber, or prevent users from refinding information while outside their Echo Chamber. This one-day workshop aims to explore and host dialogues on the fundamental areas of theory and practice in the domain of de-personalising information spaces and understanding, describing and quantifying filtered information experiences.

Background and Motivation:

Information retrieval (IR) and recommender systems and, more general, approaches in machine learning have resulted in a personalised web experience with resounding success. Building on context, location and users’ virtual (social) profiles, the web is highly aligned to users’ perceived interests, to the interests of ‘similar’ users, and to the interests of users to whom a user is digitally connected. Whilst this delivers relevant content, it also polarises informational perspectives and removes serendipity through the development of Echo Chambers: scenarios where specific ideas, beliefs or data are reinforced through repetition of a closed system that limits the free movement of alternative (competing) ideas. There is the implication that certain ideas or outcomes dominate due to, and resulting in, a bias concerning how specific input is gathered. Under-addressed in the literature are methods to qualify/quantify Echo Chambers and the associated effect(s) they have over time.

The DE-PER Workshop aims to approach the study of Echo Chambers at the intersection of IR, information science, cognitive systems, computational social science, web science, cloud computing, as well as statistics and machine learning to initiate and foster interdisciplinary dialogues on (de-)personalisation for a deeper understanding of filtered information experiences.

Topics of Interest:

We envisage the following topical categories for submission with a particular emphasis on variety and cross-disciplinary approaches:
* Reviews: Review papers concerning pertinent aspects of Echo Chambers,
* Theoretical & Empirical Models Formal approaches to represent Echo Chambers to facilitate experimental approaches, enable user comprehension, and simulate Echo Chambers,
* Metastudies: Studies that attempt to qualify/quantify/visualise the divergence of (users') search results and information experience(s),
* Experimental Methods: Methodologies for the reproducibility of studies seeking to investigate Echo Chambers,
* Experimental Infrastructures: Systems that help control and compare the effects of various degrees of (de-)personalised search scenarios,
* IR Experiments: Experiments that demonstrate/formalise any effects of Echo Chambers,
* Test Collections and Corpora: Practice and experience using, adapting, merging, and/or gathering (test) collections and experimental data sets.
* User Studies: Studies that consider multiple users or multiple user profiles (search engines, social media, etc.) and contexts (location, tasks, devices, etc.) that shed light on the differences in users' diverging search results and information experience(s), and
* Case Studies: Studies into Echo Chambers and discussion on the tangible effects and observations of (de) personalisation.

Submission Details:

All workshop submissions must be written in English and must follow the LNCS author guidelines. Full papers must not exceed 10 pages and short papers must not exceed 6 pages, including figures and references. Papers must be submitted as PDF files, electronically, and through the EasyChair paper submission system: Link will be provided soon.

All accepted papers will be made available on our website. Furthermore, we plan to invite authors of selected papers to submit an *extended version to a journal special issue*. Details about this will be provided later.


Keynote Speaker:

To be announced later


Chairs:

* Ralf Bierig, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland: ralf.bierig@mu.ie
* Simon Caton, National College of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland: simon.caton@ncirl.ie
* Ian Ruthven, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK: ian.ruthven@strath.ac.uk


Contact:

For general enquires regarding the workshop, please send an email to deper2018@gmail.com.


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