CALL FOR PAPERS
==============

Information Access in Smart Cities (i-ASC 2014) Workshop
in conjunction with ECIR 2014

http://dcs.gla.ac.uk/workshops/iASC2014/index.html

Amsterdam, Netherlands
13 April 2014


Important Dates
============

Submission deadline: 5 February 2014
Notification of acceptance: 5 March 2014
Camera-ready due: 15 March 2014
Workshop date: 13 April 2014


Overview
========

Cities of the 21st century do not only have the physical infrastructure of roads, buildings, and power networks, but also have the knowledge infrastructure represented with heterogeneous systems and big data platforms. These systems vary from low-level sensing devices including environmental sensors and CCTV cameras, to public databases, and social network streams. On the other hand, recent research has identified a variety of emerging information needs that citizens often have in their public urban spaces.These local information needs may be complex and are not necessarily served by existing systems such as web search engines. These include obtaining real-time information about local events in the city or finding free parking spaces. The aforementioned knowledge infrastructure opens up opportunities for cities to become smarter and serve the emerging information needs of their citizens by harnessing the vast amount of diverse information stemming from the various systems within the city. The workshop would be an opportunity for researchers from the information retrieval (IR) community, and other related communities, to discuss the emerging research topic of information access in smart cities, identifying its unique challenges, opportunities and future directions.
In particular, we identify four main research themes that we aim to cover
- Acquiring and digesting heterogeneous city data
- Searching smart cities
- Human interaction and context in smart cities
- Smart city applications

The goal of the workshop is twofold. Firstly, we aim to foster building a research community to work on the aforementioned research themes within smart cities. We envisage that this community will be inclusive of academics and practitioners not only in IR, but also in a variety of disciplines such as knowledge management, databases, machine learning, and human computer interfaces.
Secondly, we aim to define a roadmap for developing information access systems in smart cities, where we identify the key challenges in each of the four themes and instantiate concrete tasks we can start working on as a community.


Topics of Interest
=============

The relevant topics of interest for i-ASC include but are not limited to:

City data
- City data acquisition and integration
- Mining city databases and semantic knowledge sources
- Linked data for smart cities
- Fusing multiple sensor and social streams
- Big data platforms

Searching smart cities
- Localised search
- Searching structured city data
- Real-time search over multiple data streams
- Real-time filtering of multiple social and sensor streams
- Searching location-based social networks

Human interaction and context
- Zero-query access in smart cities
- Modelling contextual information
- Modelling personal and social interests
- Personalisation and recommendation
- Mobile interfaces
- Exploration and discovery in smart cities

Applications
- Monitoring transportation
- Tourism accessibility
- Security and disaster management


Submission Details
==============

We welcome submissions of technical papers (4 pages max) and position papers (2 pages max). All papers should be formatted in the standard ACM conference format, with a two-column layout and must be submitted electronically in a printable PDF format through the Easy Chair submission page:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iasc2014

The submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the program committee. Authors of accepted papers will be invited to present their papers at the workshop. The workshop will have an interactive setting where we will also have breakout sessions after the presentations to reflect on the papers and the keynotes. The aim of the breakout sessions is to conclude with a roadmap for developing information access systems in smart cities.


Organising Committee
================

- M-Dyaa Albakour (University of Glasgow)
- Craig Macdonald (University of Glasgow)
- Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow)
- Charles L. A. Clarke (University of Waterloo)
- Veli Bicer (IBM Research Ireland)


Program Committee
===============

- Fernando Diaz (Microsoft Research)
- Jaap Kamps (University of Amsterdam)
- Paul Thomas (CSIRO)
- Daqing He (University of Pittsburgh)
- Omar Alonso (Microsoft Bing)
- Freddy Lecue (IBM Research Ireland)
- Raffaele Perego (ISTI CNR)
- Cathal Gurrin (Dublin City University)
- Franco Maria Nardini (ISTI CNR)
- Suzan Verberne (Radboud University Nijmegen)

The PC list will be expanded later.