ECIR Workshop on Information Retrieval over Social Networks
http://viper.unige.ch/IR+SN

In conjunction with ECIR 2009 (http://ecir09.irit.fr)

Popular online communities and services such as Flickr, Youtube, Facebook or
LinkedIn are spearheading an emerging type of information on the Web. This
informat ion is composed of classical textual and multimedia data, in
concert with additional data (tags, annotations, comments, ratings). Perhaps
most significantly, the information is overlaid on an explicit social
network created by the participants of each of these communities. The result
is a rich structure of inter-relationships between content items,
participants and services.
Although the size of such networks requires the use of advanced Information
Retrieval techniques, classical IR models are not tailored for this type of
content as they do not (in general) take advantage of the particular
structure and unique aspects of this socially-driven content. This workshop
proposes to report about the state-of-the-art in this direction and to
gather a relevant panel of researchers working in the field. We look for
contributions in all aspects of Information Retrieval over Social Networks,
including:

* Applications of Information Retrieval over Social Network
* Adapted IR models for Social Networks
* Mining Social Network data
* Privacy issues in Social Network information retrieval
* Trust and Reliability issues in Social Network information retrieval
* Knowledge and Content Discovery in Social Networks
* Information diffusion over Social Networks
* Performance evaluation for the above (measures, test collections,...)

All submitted papers will then be peer-reviewed by the workshop programme
committee. The paper selection criteria are the same as that of the main
conference. Submissions must be written in English following the ACM SIG
Proceedings style
(http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates), not exceeding
6 pages including references and figures.
We target the edition of a Special Issue in a known IR journal as a result
of the workshop.

Important dates:
* January 30th, 2009: Submission deadline
* February 20th, 2009: Acceptance notification

Organisation:
* Stephane Marchand-Maillet, University of Geneva, Switzerland
* Arjen P de Vries, CWI/TU Delft, The Netherlands
* Mor Naaman, Rutgers University, USA

Programme Committee (initial list - alphabetical order):
* Sihem Amer-Yahia, Yahoo! Research, USA
* Susanne Boll, Oldenburg, Germany
* Eric Bruno, Geneva, Switzerland
* Fabio Crestani, Lugano, Switzerland
* Brian Davison, Lehigh University, USA
* Alan Hanjalic, TU Delft, The Netherlands
* Paul Heymann, Stanford University, USA
* Gareth Jones, DCU, Ireland
* Joemon Jose, Glasgow, UK
* Amelie Marian, Rutgers University, USA
* Bernard Merialdo, EURECOM, France
* Wolfgang Mueller, EML Research - Villa Bosch, Germany
* Adam Rae, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona