Exploratory Search and Interactive Data Analytics (ESIDA)
Limassol, Cyprus, March 13, 2017
https://sites.google.com/site/esida2017/
Hosted by IUI 2017, March 13-16, 2017
http://iui.acm.org/2017/

Workshop Topic and Description
In recent years, retrieval techniques operating on text or semantic annotations, have become the industry standard for retrieval from large data collections, such as documents, images, videos, music, medical data. This approach works well with sufficient high-quality meta-data or tagging. However, with the explosive growth of big data collections, it has become apparent that tagging new data quickly and efficiently is not always possible. Secondly, even if instantaneous high quality data tagging were possible, there would still be many instances, where search by keyword query is problematic. For example, in the case of image retrieval it might be easier for a user to define their query if they are looking for an image of a cat, but how would they specify that the cat should be of a particular shade of ginger with sad looking eyes? A solution to these problems is active engagement of the user in the information retrieval loop, thus enabling the user to not only explore a given dataset more easily but also gradually direct their search to a more specific area of the search space .

The aim of this workshop is to explore new methods and interface/system design for interactive data analytics and management in various domains, including specialised text collections (e.g. legal, medical, scientific), multimedia, and bioinformatics, as well as for various tasks, such as semantic information retrieval, conceptual organization and clustering of data collections for sense making, semantic expert profiling, and document/multimedia recommender systems. The primary audience of the workshop are researchers and practitioners in the area of interactive and personalised system design as well as interactive machine learning both from academia and industry. IUI, with its focus on the intersection of HCI and AI, is a perfect venue where researchers from system/interface design community and the machine learning community can meet.

Workshop Target Areas
The workshop aims to solicit submissions in all areas of interactive data analytics and exploratory search including:
- design, testing and assessment of interactive systems for data analytics
- interactive data visualisation for exploratory and investigative analysis
- interactive classification and clustering of data
- user assisted curation and validation of the analysis process, and generation of data visualisations
- user engagement in the semantic analysis process via suitable annotation and correction tools
- study of the trade-off between accuracy of the results and user effort
- personalisation and user modelling related to interactive system design

Submissions aimed at solving practical problems in specific application domains are especially welcome, including:
- digital libraries
- legal document management
- personalized online learning systems
- news media
- biomedical data
- multimedia collections
- specialised image and video collections, e.g. medical images.

We encourage submissions of work in progress, concept papers, case studies, and generally material that will stimulate discussion, generate useful feedback to the authors, encourage research collaborations and vigorous exchange of ideas on promising research directions, in one of the following formats:
- full papers (up to 8 pages in the ACM format), which will presented either as contributed talks or posters
- extended abstracts (up to 4 pages in ACM format), which will be presented as posters with a possibility to be accompanied by a demo.

Submission information: Submissions to the workshop will be through EasyChair, https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=esida2017
The accepted workshop papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.
In addition, a special issue with the title “Exploratory Search and Interactive Data Analytics (ESIDA)” will be proposed to an appropriate journal based on the contents of the accepted papers, for example the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, http://tiis.acm.org/. The special issue will involve an open call, to which workshop authors will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers.

Important dates:
Submission deadline: December 16th, 2016 (midnight Hawaii time)
Acceptance notification: January 8th, 2017
Final manuscript due: January 13th, 2017

Workshop date:
March 13th, 2017

Workshop location:
St. Raphael Resort, Limassol, Cyprus - http://iui.acm.org/2017/venue.html

Organizers:
Dorota Glowacka, Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Finland
Evangelos Milios, Faculty of Computer Science, Dalhousie University, Canada
Axel J. Soto, School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK
Fernando V. Paulovich, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

Program Committee
Peter Bruzilovsky (University of Pittsburgh, USA)
Giuseppe Carenini (University of British Columbia, Canada)
Patrik Floreen (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Giulio Jacucci (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Alan Medlar (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Torsten Moller (University of Vienna, Austria)
Michael Sedlmair (University of Vienna, Austria)
John Stasko (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
Julita Vassileva (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
Eduardo Veas (University of Cuyo, Argentina; Know-Center, Austria)