Call for Papers (and Participation)

THE SIGIR 2008 WORKSHOP ON
FUTURE CHALLENGES IN EXPERTISE RETRIEVAL

Singapore, 24 July 2008
http://ilps.science.uva.nl/fCHER/

MOTIVATION

At the TREC Enterprise Track in 2005 the need to study and understand
expertise retrieval (ER) was recognized through the introduction of an
Expert Finding task (as opposed to mere document retrieval). The task
has generated a lot of interest in the IR community, and rapid
progress has been made in terms of modeling, algorithms, and
evaluation over the past 3 years. In fact, expertise retrieval has
reached the point where it is appropriate to assess progress, bring
people from different research communities together, and define a
research agenda for the next years. This workshop aims to determine
what we have accomplished and where we need to go from here in
expertise retrieval.

AREAS OF INTEREST

The main theme of the workshop concerns future challenges in Expertise
Retrieval. Instead of focusing on core algorithmic aspects of a
specific expert finding scenario (as is the case for the TREC Expert
Finding task), our aim is to broaden the topic area and to seek for
potential connections with other related fields. We expect submissions
from the following areas:

* Information Retrieval
* Knowledge Management
* Organization Information Systems
* Social Network Analysis
* Social Web
* Virtual Communities
* User Modeling
* Human-Computer Interaction

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

This venue accepts submissions of research papers (up to 8 pages),
position papers (up to 4 pages), and demo descriptions (up to 2
pages). Submissions must be in English, and must contain original
work. All papers, independent of being a research, position, or demo
paper, must be able to generate discussion during the workshop, and
consequently the PC will favor original and controversial ideas.

IMPORTANT DATES

* 16 May Paper submission deadline
* 6 Jun Notification of acceptance
* 20 Jun Camera-ready papers due
* 24 Jul Workshop

WORKSHOP FORMAT

The workshop is aimed to facilitate discussion and interaction among
participants. The workshop will feature regular contributed paper
presentations (20 min/each), demo presentations (5 min/each) and
include discussion between presenters and the audience (10 min/each).
The workshop will also feature an invited speaker, as well as a panel
to wrap up the event.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

* Krisztian Balog, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
* Yong Yu, Apex Knowledge & Data Management Lab, China

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

* Arjen de Vries, CWI, The Netherlands
* Bettina Berendt, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
* ChengXiang Zhai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
* Craig Macdonald, University of Glasgow, UK
* David Hawking, CSIRO, Australia
* Elaine Toms, Dalhousie University, Canada
* Henry Kautz, University of Rochester, USA
* Ian Soboroff, NIST, USA
* Irma Becerra-Fernandez, Florida International University, USA
* Jianhan Zhu, Open University, UK
* Jimmy Huang, York University, Canada
* Jun Wang, University College London, UK
* Leif Azzopardi, University of Glasgow, UK
* Loren Terveen, University of Minnesota, USA
* Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
* Mark S. Ackerman, University of Michigan, USA
* Peter Bailey, Microsoft Research, USA
* Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain
* Yutaka Matsuo, Japanese National Institute of Advanced
Industrial Science and Technology, Japan

MORE INFORMATION
http://ilps.science.uva.nl/fCHER/