Second International Workshop on
Supporting Search and Sensemaking for Electronically Stored Information
in Discovery Proceedings (DESI II)

Wednesday June 25, 2008
University College London, U.K.
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/S.Attfield/desi/

Call for Papers

Legal applications of search technology have been of longstanding
interest, and indexing techniques for legislation, regulations, and
case law are highly developed. While work on those topics continues,
interest in a new class of digital evidence management applications,
often referred to as "E-Discovery," is increasing rapidly, in part
because electronically stored information (ESI) has become a pervasive
component of many routine commercial and government activities in many
countries around the world. These applications raise important new
challenges for the legal search community, including:

- New types of materials, including informal language (e.g., in
instant messaging), extreme content diversity (as is common in
email), and other media (e.g., voicemail, photographs, video).

- Unprecedented requirements for scalable work processes, with
million-document collections today, and billion-document collections
likely not too far in the future.

- Management of a complex array of interlocking rights and privileges
(e.g., personal privacy, attorney-client privilege, and executive
privilege in government).

No existing community possesses the expertise to attack these
challenges alone, so our goal is to bring together researchers and
practitioners with relevant expertise to help shape the research
agenda to address these new challenges.

In 2007, participants from five continents gathered together for the
first DESI Workshop in California.

Participation in the Second DESI Workshop is invited from all
interested parties, including e-discovery firms, legal practitioners,
and researchers in information retrieval, human language technology,
digital forensics, natural language processing, text classification,
archival science, information studies, legal sensemaking and
human-computer interaction worldwide. We expect to invite an even
balance between practitioners and researchers, and to achieve the best
possible balance across national settings for the practitioners and
across research communities for the researchers.

Submissions:

Two types of written contributions are invited:

Original papers describing research or practice. Research papers
should not exceed 10 pages in length, and shorter papers are welcomed
(no minimum length is specified). Accepted papers will be included in
the working notes of the workshop that will be distributed in print to
participants and posted on the Web.

Brief (typically 1-2 page) position papers describing individual
interests, for inclusion (without review) in the working notes and on
the web site. Brief descriptions of this type are particularly
valuable when bringing together diverse research communities.
Additionally, these papers can help with our selection of discussion
leaders and panelists.

Please submit original research papers and statements of position by
email to s.attfield@cs.ucl.ac.uk

To encourage delegates to contribute position papers (at least),
registration is limited to those submitting papers until 10th May,
after which registration will be open.

Important Dates (all 2008):

May 9 Deadline for paper submissions
May 26 Notification of acceptance for research papers
June 6 Deadline for camera ready version of accepted research papers
June 25 Second DESI Workshop, London UK
June 26-27 International Digital Evidence Conference, London UK

Organising Commitee:

Simon J. Attfield, University College London
Jason R. Baron, National Archives and Records Administration
Stephen Mason, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies
Douglas W. Oard, University of Maryland