Call for Papers - searching4fun (http://fitlab.eu/searching4fun/submission.php)
Workshop at ECIR 2012, April 1., 2012 Barcelona, Spain


About the Workshop

People spend more and more time online, not just to find information, but with the goal of enjoying themselves and passing time. Research has begun to show that during casual-leisure search, peoples’ intentions, their motivations, their criteria for success, and their querying behaviour all differ from typical web search, whilst potentially representing a significant portion of search queries. This workshop will investigate searching for fun, or casual-leisure search, and aims to understand this increasingly important type of searching, bring together relevant IR sub-communities (e.g. recommender systems, result diversity, multimedia retrieval) and related disciplines, discuss new and early research, and create a vision for future work in this area.


There are lots of other open questions relating to searching for fun: What are people’s querying patterns like in these situations? How can systems, models, and algorithms better support users in this behaviour? What are the best approaches or measures to evaluate solutions? How can search be made more engaging, interactive, fun? These are important questions for the domain of information retrieval, and so ECIR is a key venue for gathering searchers from around the world to talk about searching for fun.

The topics of the workshop will be evaluation focused and include but are not be limited to:

- Understanding information needs and search behaviour in casual-leisure situations.
- How existing systems are used in casual-leisure searching scenarios.
- Systems / Interfaces / Algorithmic approaches to supporting Search in Casual-leisure situations.
- Use of Recommender Systems for Entertaining Content (books, movies, videos, music, websites).
- Modelling of users interests and generation of accurate and appropriate user profiles.
- Interfaces for exploratory search for casual-leisure situations.
- Evaluation (methods, metrics) of Casual-leisure searching situations.

Organisers

- David Elsweiler, University of Regensburg, Germany
- Max L. Wilson, Swansea University, UK
- Morgan Harvey, University of Erlangen, Germany

Submissions

Participants should submit anonymised 2-4 page ACM format PDFs to the easychair page. More details are in our submissions page. http://fitlab.eu/searching4fun/submission.php

Important Dates

Submissions: 3rd Feb 2012
Notifications: 24th Feb 2012
Camera Ready: 2nd March 2012
Workshop: 1st April 2012