WWW 2014 Workshop - Connecting Online & Offline Life (COOL2014)

You are cordially invited to submit a contribution to "Connecting Online & Offline Life" (COOL2014), a one-day workshop of the 23rd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW'14), to be held in Seoul, Korea on April 8, 2014.

The cross-fertilization of social and technical systems research is rapidly
expanding: new fields of research, such as computational social science, data science, data-driven urban research and anthropology, are emerging and the big social data is revolutionizing many classical disciplines.

This workshop represents an effort toward melding these communities to trigger new collaborations and delineate future challenges.

Particular attention will be devoted, but not limited to, the following topics:

- Studying offline (real-world) human activities using online data
- Comparing social interactions on the web with offline ones
- Urban research and geo-social studies using web and social data
- Harnessing online data to understand and predict offline phenomena
- Studying human behaviors using online games
- Personal analytics and online sharing behaviors
- Social movements and the web
- Politics online and offline
- Crime on the web and crimes using the web

More information on COOL2014 can be found here: http://www.cool2014.com More information on WWW'14 can be found here: http://www2014.kr

On Twitter: @COOLws2014 (#cool2014): https://twitter.com/COOLws2014

Important Dates
***************

- Workshop paper deadlines: Jan 7, 2014 (23:59 Hawaii Standard Time)
- Workshop paper notifications: Feb 4, 2014
- Workshop paper final copy hard deadline: Feb 12, 2014

Requirements
************

Participants are invited to submit their papers via the EasyChair system at the following link: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cool2014

The authors will submit original research paper occupying up to 8 pages, including references. The paper must be written in English, and formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings template.

Submissions must include the following information: title, list of authors with affiliations, abstract and full paper attachment. Accepted format is PDF only.

Publication
***********

All papers accepted in the workshop will appear in the WWW 2014 Conference proceedings and will be published through the ACM Digital Library.

More information, about selection, registration, etc., can be found here:
http://www.cool2014.com/?page_id=14

Special Issue: The best contributions will be considered for an invitation in extended version in the thematic series “Collective behaviors and Networks” published on EPJ Data Science (Springer).


Organizing Committee
********************

Emilio Ferrara, Indiana University, US
Yana Volkovich, Barcelona Media, Spain
Yong-Yeol Ahn, Indiana University, US
Young-Ho Eom, University of Toulouse, France

Program Committee
*****************

Luca M. Aiello (Yahoo! Research)
Giovanni Ciampaglia (Indiana University)
Michele Coscia (Harvard University)
Pasquale De Meo (University of Messina)
Alessandro Flammini (Indiana University)
Santo Fortunato (Aalto University)
Matteo Gagliolo (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Bruno Goncalves (Aix-Marseille Université)
Maria Grineva (Yandex Labs)
Jerome Kunegis (University of Cambridge)
Andrea Lancichinetti (Northwestern University)
Illias Leontiadis (Telefonica Research)
Nicola Perra (Northeastern University)
Giovanni Petri (ISI Foundation)
Alexander Petersen (IMT Lucca)
Alessandro Provetti (Oxford-Man Institute)
Jose’ J. Ramasco (IFISC CSIC-UIB)
Giancarlo Ruffo (University of Turin)
Roberta Sinatra (Northeastern University)
Claudia Wagner (Leibniz Institute)
Ingmar Weber (Qatar Computing)

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Professor/Director, Serious Games Institute, Coventry University, UK

Professor/Director, Serious Games Institute
Application closing date     17/01/2014
Faculty / School or Service     Faculty of Engineering and Computing
Salary     Grade 10, £57,900 - £84,930 per annum
Package     As one of Coventry's biggest employers, we offer some pretty impressive benefits including a final salary pension and generous holiday allowances
Job category/type     Academic
Job description    
Full-time


Recently rated "Modern University of the Year" by The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2014, and "Entrepreneurial University of the Year" in 2011 by The Times, Coventry University is really going places.  The Faculty of Engineering and Computing has invested GBP 55M over the last 3 years in state-of-the-art facilities for teaching and research, and has ambitious aspirations for its research profile toward REF2020.

We now seek a well-established and talented Professor, with a strong background in virtual worlds, serious games and HCI Pedagogy / Science of learning, to lead our Serious Games Institute (SGI), an International Centre for Excellence in Serious Games Applied Research, Business Engagement and study, which has a wide and varied portfolio of live FP7 and EPSRC funded projects.

With a strong track-record in research and securing major grants, you will have the clear vision, talent for leadership, and creativity to lead to new heights this ambitious 16-strong team of established, independent researchers and PhD students.  Your commitment to excellence will be matched by your collegiate approach, as you implement strategies for growth and development hand in hand with the Faculty in which the Institute resides.

We are seeking someone who shares the vision and ambition to ensure maximum impact from our research portfolio; providing research into innovative policy alternatives and relevant practical solutions, within a complex and changing world.

You will already have an international standing as a researcher and scholar, with proven abilities to inspire and engage a broad range of stakeholders.  The person appointed will have overall responsibility for the development and management of the SGI and will provide strategic direction to it. They will be expected to build on the external networks of collaboration with major stakeholders in government, business and civil society, in the UK and internationally.

For a discussion about the role and the contribution you could make in these exciting times, please contact Professor Elena Gaura, Associate Dean (Research), Faculty of Engineering and Computing:  e.gaura@coventry.ac.uk   or 07757 425515.

The closing date for applications is Friday, 17th January (Midnight) and interviews are likely to take place at the end of January 2014.

https://staffrecruitment.coventry.ac.uk/tlive_webrecruitment/wrd/run/ETREC107GF.open?VACANCY_ID=23604370EE&WVID=1861420Izv&LANG=USA

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Job Opening on Large-Scale Data Management in Sensor-rich environments, Bielefeld, Germany

Postdoctoral/Doctoral position in "Large-scale stream data management and machine learning in sensor-rich environments" at the Cognitive Interaction Technology Center of Excellence, Bielefeld
The Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology [1] at Bielefeld University, Germany has an open position in the area of large-scale stream data management and machine learning in sensor-rich environments.


In order to exploit the proliferating sensor information available in today's intelligent systems such as mobile robots and to scale up the application of learning algorithms, efficient management of streaming and stateful system data is an important challenge. The goal of the project is to develop novel memory architectures that allow to efficiently store, index, and query sensorial in addition to symbolic data extracted from real-time data streams or processed and managed by higher-level components targeting learning and human-machine interaction tasks.
The successful candidate will work together with a group of scientists on developing novel solutions in the context of intelligent smart homes and robotics that learn to adapt their behaviour to users and situations. For this, a scalable data management and memory infrastructure is needed. The candidate will contribute to the development of this infrastructure, building on mature large-scale data management and storage solutions, in particular NoSQL or graph databases, and develop novel solutions for the use cases and requirements of the project on top of existing solutions. A particular challenge will be to develop a software architecture that is highly available targeting 24/7 operation, while at the same time supporting real-time application running in a smart environment. Example challenges and tasks to be tackled include the following ones:


* develop data management solutions that scale to rapid and huge data streams
* develop flexible data structures that allow to move between different layers of representational granularity with recent data having the highest granularity
* develop synopsis and summary data structures for the data stream in order to support answering frequent queries
* efficient implementation of distance measures for approximate querying
* develop data structures and models that can model the relations between different representations stored in memory, allowing to query/filter by relations




This position is particularly suitable for candidates interested in working with Big Data in the context of embodied intelligent systems for human-machine interaction and willing to acquire the skills necessary to work on real-time processing of large data streams.


The successful candidate is expected to have a strong background in at least three of the following areas:


- Data Modelling & Data Management
- Stream Data Management (load shedding, window-based computation, )
- Relational or Graph Databases
- NoSQL databases (e.g. HBASE, RIAK, MongoDB, ...)
- Large-scale Machine Learning and Data Mining
- Sensor Networks
- Software Engineering


Candidates with expertise in several topics will be given preference. Applicants are expected to have strong programming skills, the ability to work independently, strong interpersonal skills as well as strong English language skills. Candidates should be qualified for and willing to perform state-of-the-art research. Knowledge of German is not required.


CITEC is a leading centre in the area of cognitive and intelligent systems, spanning more than 40 PIs with their research groups and spanning at least five disciplines (Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Biology and Sport Science) at Bielefeld University [2]. Candidates are expected to be interested in interdisciplinary and group work.


CITEC provides the chance to perform cutting-edge research in an international context. Applicants for a postdoc position will have the chance to perform independent research on the topics of the group that qualifies them for an academic career and allows them to position themselves as independent researchers in the community. PhD applicants will receive supervision and support in developing the necessary skills to produce high-quality research necessary to earn a PhD Degree. Candidates will be supervised by a team of well-known researchers in the field of intelligent system, in particular by Prof. Philipp Cimiano and Dr. Sebastian Wrede.


The salary for both PhD and postdoc positions is around 3.300 Euro per month (pre taxes), according to scale TV-L E 13 in the German University System and can vary depending on age, marital status, tax class etc. The salary increases with the duration of the employment. An online tool to calculate the post-tax income can be found at [3] (indicating E-13).


Bielefeld is one of the 20 largest cities in Germany (with close to 330.000 inhabitants) [4]. It is a lively city with a lot of cultural and entertainment opportunities (see [5]). It is located in the heart of the Teutoburg Forest [6], offering many opportunities for outdoor and leisure activities.


The position is available for two years and can be prolonged for one more year. Candidates are expected to start on March 1st, 2014.


Applications from suitably qualified handicapped and severely handicapped persons are expressly encouraged. Bielefeld University has received a number of awards for its achievements in the provision of equal opportunity and has been recognised as a family friendly university. The University welcomes applications from women. This is particularly true with regard both to academic and technical posts as well as positions in Information Technology and trades and crafts. Applications are handled according to the provisions of the state equal opportunity statutes.


Applications are invited until January 6th, 2014 and will be processed as they are received. Interviews will be scheduled via Skype or F2F in January.


Applicants will be informed of the outcome of the selection by end of October 2013. Applications should be sent by email to Prof. Philipp Cimiano at cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de, preferably as *one* PDF document including a CV, motivation letter, publication record (if applicable), record of teaching activities (if applicable) and any other relevant information in addition to the names of two referees. The application should highlight the expertise in the areas mentioned above and express the research interests of the applicant.



[1] http://www.cit-ec.de/
[2] http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/International/
[3] http://oeffentlicher-dienst.info/tv-l/west/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld
[5] http://www.bielefeld.de/en/index.html
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teutoburg_Forest

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PhD Fellowship in the area of Big Data Analytics, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway

The Department of Computer and Information Science have opening 1 PhD
scholarship in the area of BigData Analytics. The scholarship is for three
years, with an opening for one additional year of work duties (as teaching
assistant, etc.) for the department.

Our society has been overwhelmed with the explosion of data, where most data
are available in digital form and the total amount of data grows
exponentially. This has lead to the emergence of BigData as a research area.
The BigData research initiative was established in 2013 by the Faculty for
Information Technology, Mathematics and Electrical Engineering, NTNU, to
precisely address the related research and technological challenges incurred
by the explosion of data in the society.

As part of this research initiative, the Norwegian University of Science and
Technology (NTNU) wants to employ a PhD student within one of the following target
areas:

* Bigdata analytical methods for Social Media.
* Spatio-Temporal indexing and retrieval.
* Spatio-Temporal aspects in Recommender Systems
* Content Personalization

Specific Conditions: The appointment is at salary code 1017, which currently
corresponds to a yearly gross income of NOK 421.100 (equivalent to approx.
EUR 52.000 and USD 70.000).

Our group is highly international and English is the working language.

For further information about the fellowship, please contact Project
Coordinator Assoc. Professor Heri Ramampiaro (heri at idi.ntnu.no).

For more detailed information about the research group, see:
http://www.idi.ntnu.no/grupper/dif/

For the full announcement and application instructions see
http://www.jobbnorge.no/job.aspx?jobid=98423

Closing date: 2014-01-02

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ACM International Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2014)

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

ACM International Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys) 2014

Oct 6-10, 2014, Foster City, Silicon Valley, California

http://recsys.acm.org/recsys14/

We are pleased to invite you to participate in the premier annual event on research and applications of recommendation technologies, the Eighth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2014). The conference will be held from Oct 6 to 10, 2014 in Foster City, Silicon Valley, California. Previous conferences have been distinguished by a strong level of interaction between researchers and practitioners in the sharing of ideas, problems and solutions. The 2014 conference will continue and reinforce this tradition due to its location in Silicon Valley, the home of some of the world's largest technology companies and of thousands of startups.

We construe recommender systems broadly, including applications ranging from e-commerce to social networking, platforms from web to mobile and beyond, and a wide variety of technologies ranging from collaborative filtering to case-based reasoning. Topics of interest for RecSys 2014 include (but are not limited to):

- Algorithm scalability

- Case studies of real-world implementations

- Conversational recommender systems

- Context-aware recommenders

- Evaluation metrics and studies

- Explanations and evidence

- Group recommenders

- Impact studies

- Innovative/New applications

- Machine learning for recommendation

- Novel paradigms

- Personalization

- Preference elicitation

- Privacy and Security

- Recommendation algorithms

- Social recommenders

- User interfaces

- Semantic web technologies for recommendation

- Targeted advertising

- Trust and reputation

- Theoretical foundations

- User modelling

- User studies

We encourage various types of submissions:

TECHNICAL PAPERS 

- Long paper submissions should report on substantial contributions of lasting value. The maximum length is 8 pages. Each accepted long paper will be included in the conference proceedings and presented in a plenary session as part of the main conference program. We expect the review process to be highly selective: the acceptance rates for full papers in the past three years were 20-24%.

- Short paper submissions typically discuss exciting new work that is not yet mature enough for a long paper. The maximum length is 4 pages. Each accepted short paper will be included in the conference proceedings and presented in a poster session. The presentation may include a system demonstration. Note that rejected long paper submissions will not be automatically considered as short papers.

DOCTORAL CONSORTIUM PAPERS

The Doctoral Consortium will provide doctoral students with the opportunity to have substantive interaction with other researchers on their dissertation topic. It will also allow students to establish a supportive community, including other doctoral students at similar stages of their dissertation research. The maximum paper length is 4 pages. Each accepted paper will be included in the conference proceedings and presented in the doctoral consortium.

WORKSHOPS

The goal of the workshops is to provide additional venues for presenting research-in-progress on topics of interest and an informal forum to discuss research questions and challenges in greater depth and detail. A 2-page summary of each accepted workshop will be included in the conference proceedings.

  

TUTORIALS

The goal of the tutorials is to provide the larger conference community an opportunity to learn about recommender system concepts and techniques, and to serve as a venue to share presenters' expertise with the global community of recommender system researchers and practitioners. A 2-page summary of each accepted tutorial will be included in the conference proceedings.

DEMOS

The demo session provides an exciting way for researchers and developers to present new recommender ideas, show off their work, and get valuable feedback from the recommender systems community. Demo submissions must include a narrated screen capture. A 2-page summary of each accepted demo will be included in the conference proceedings.

POSTERS

The poster session offers an opportunity for presenting late-breaking research results and speculative or innovative work in progress. The informal setting of the poster session encourages presenters and participants to engage in lively discussions about the presented work. A two-page summary of each accepted poster will be included in the extended proceedings of the conference.

All submissions and reviews will be handled electronically in PDF format. RecSys 2014 submissions should be prepared according to the standard ACM SIG proceedings format. We provide paper templates in Microsoft Word and LaTeX on the conference website. More details on the submission procedure will be available at http://recsys.acm.org/recsys14/call/ closer to the submission deadlines. The fully-refereed proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library and, like past RecSys proceedings, are expected to be widely read and cited. The extended proceedings will be made available differently.

===================================================

Important Dates

===================================================

Long/Short Papers:

- Papers due: May 7, 2014

- Acceptance notification: July 7, 2014

- Camera-ready papers due: July 24, 2014

Doctoral Consortium Papers:

- Papers due: June 2, 2014

- Acceptance notification: July 7, 2014

- Camera-Ready papers due: July 24, 2014

Workshop Proposals:

- Proposals due: April 7, 2014

- Acceptance notification: April 28, 2014

- Workshop papers due: July 21, 2014

- Camera-ready workshop summaries due: July 24, 2014

Tutorial Proposals:

- Proposals due: May 19, 2014

- Acceptance notification: June 9, 2014

- Camera-ready tutorial summaries due: July 24, 2014

Demos:

- Proposals due: May 19, 2014

- Acceptance notification: July 7, 2014

- Camera-ready demo summaries due: July 24, 2014

Posters (late-breaking contributions):

- Submissions due: July 21, 2014

- Acceptance notification: August 18, 2014

- Camera-ready poster summaries due: August 29, 2014

Conference Dates: Oct. 6-10, 2014

===================================================

Questions?

===================================================

More information at: http://recsys.acm.org/recsys14/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ACMRecSys

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/acmrecsys

LinkedIn group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/ACM-RecSys-7421136

Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/recsys/

General Co-chairs (general2014*):

- Alfred Kobsa, UC Irvine, USA

- Michelle Zhou, IBM, USA

Program Co-chairs (program2014*):

- Martin Ester, Simon Fraser University, Canada

- Yehuda Koren, Google, USA

Workshop Co-chairs (workshops2014*):

- Lior Rokach, Ben Gurion University, Israel

- Badrul Sarwar, eBay, USA

Tutorial Co-chairs (tutorials2014*):

- Alexander Felfernig, TU Graz, Austria

- Bee-Chung Chen, LinkedIn, USA

Doctoral Symposium Co-chairs (doctoral2014*):

- Yi Zhang, UC Santa Cruz, USA

- Shlomo Berkovsky, NICTA, Australia

Poster and Demo Co-chairs (posters2014*):

- Li Chen, Hong Kong Baptist University, China

- Jalal Mahmud, IBM Research, USA

Proceedings Chair (proceedings2014*):

- Bark Knijnenburg, UC Irvine, USA

Publicity Co-chairs (publicity2014*):

- Alan Said, CWI, The Netherlands

- Tim Hussein, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

Treasurer (treasurer2014*):

- Susan Crow, IBM, USA

Local Arrangements and Student Volunteer Co-chairs (local2014*):

- Jian Wang, LinkedIn, USA

- Susan Crow, IBM, USA

*) for email address, replace '*' by '@recsys.acm.org'

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Numerous Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Fellowships in Business Intelligence and Big Data Analytics

Numerous Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Fellowships in Business Intelligence and Big Data Analytics

ERASMUS MUNDUS JOINT DOCTORATE in INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES for BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE - Doctoral College (IT4BI-DC) (http://it4bi-dc.ulb.ac.be/)

provides EU-funded SCHOLARSHIPS to students selected by the IT4BI-DC Consortium.

The IT4BI-DC Consortium is composed of the following institutions:
- Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) (Belgium),
- Aalborg Universitet (AAU) (Denmark),
- Technische Universitaet Dresden (TUD) (Germany),
- Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) (Spain),
- Poznan University of Technology (PUT) (Poland).

The selected PhD students will receive net salary between €1300 - €2200, depending on the institution. More details concerning the funds are available at http://it4bi-dc.ulb.ac.be/fellowships_funds

RESEARCH AREAS
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The IT4BI-DC Programme offers multiple cutting-edge research topics in the areas including:

- Information Integration
- Large-Scale Processing
- Information Discovery
- Big Data Analytics
- Modeling and Semantics
- Collaboration and Privacy

The detailed list of topics and Partners that manage them is available at:
http://it4bi-dc.ulb.ac.be/topics

AWARDED DEGREE
-----------------------------------------------------------------
A graduate from the IT4BI-DC Programme will be awarded either a join degree or double degree offered by two of the Partner institutions. The type of the degree awarded is subject to internal regulations of the countries where the Partner institutions are located.

IMPORTANT DATES
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD candidates applying for an Erasmus Mundus scholarship:

December 13th, 2013 : scholarship application deadline
January 6th, 2014 : uploading reference letters deadline
End of February 2014: preliminary decision of the scholarship
Mid May 2014 : formal confirmation of the scholarship granting

PhD candidates not applying for an Erasmus Mundus scholarship but willing to join the programme on their own expenses:

April 30th, 2014: progrmme application deadline for Non-European students June 30th, 2014 : programme application deadline for European students

PhD candidates are required to apply via the IT4BI-DC online application form that is available at http://it4bi-dc.ulb.ac.be/emundus


Detailed information on the application process is available at:
http://it4bi-dc.ulb.ac.be/apply
Enquiries should be sent to: it4bidc@cs.ulb.ac.be

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Second International Workshop on Collaboration and Gaming (CoGames 2014)

Second International Workshop on Collaboration and Gaming (CoGames 2014)

Call for Papers and Participation

As part of The 2014 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2014)  

http://cts2014.cisedu.info

May 19-23, 2014

The Commons Hotel

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

In Cooperation with ACM, IEEE, and IFIP (Pending)

Submission Deadline: December 30, 2013

Submissions could be for full papers, short papers, poster papers, or posters


SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES
Development of video games is by definition a multi disciplinary process involving several professions, ranging from artists to engineers.  The AAA game titles produced today require rather large teams with a high level of competence (technology, programming, networks, architecture, etc.), creativity and skills.  Compared to traditional software development, game development is characterized by rapid changes of hardware, high performance requirements, and software requirements that are unstable and hard to predict.  Video games are also used for other purposes than pure entertainment, e.g., for education, training, exercising, and simulation.

In the current trends, game developers are focusing more and more on games where players must collaborate to achieve goals in the game.  Collaborative games introduce challenges for game developers to handle technical issues, performance issues, network issues, distributed environments, sharing of information, and heterogeneous networks and devices.  Further, collaborative games open new areas and applications for games to be used for new purposes that can benefit from more than just fun. Creation of these "serious collaborative games" adds additional challenges including matching of content and game activity and modeling of player proficiencies.  As players expect that games can be played anywhere, the integration of mobile gaming, hand-held and online-gaming on smartphones, consoles and tablets is becoming ever more important.  This integration introduces new challenges and leads to new opportunities.

This Workshop on Collaboration and Gaming - held as part of the 2014 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2014) - will focus on the area of collaboration and gaming, with emphasis on new game concepts, new technologies, evaluations, usage areas and games prototypes.  Special attention is dedicated to serious games, in particular for learning.  The aim is to have a dedicated track that fosters closer interactions among researchers, industry and users communities, providing an opportunity for them to meet and discuss their ideas.  We invite original contributions from researchers in academia and computer industry on these emerging and important areas of information technology.  Papers should contribute to an advancement over the state of the art, preferentially providing empirical results from new tools/systems and/or user studies.

CoGames Topics of Interest include (but are not limited to): • Collaborative games, game technology and game frameworks • Collaborative serious games • Platforms for collaborative games • Usability of collaborative games • Mobile collaborative games and game frameworks • Quality of service in collaborative games • Online collaborative games • Computational and artificial intelligence to support collaborative gaming • User profiling and performance assessment in collaborative games • Modelling of users and interactions • Learning and Adaptation in collaborative games • Reliability and availability in collaborative games • Real-time issues (e.g., networking, computation) in collaborative games • Integration and interoperability in collaborative games • Pervasive/ubiquitous collaborative games • New software engineering tools and methods for designing collaborative games • Requirement engineering of collaborative games • Design and software a!
rchitecture of collaborative games • Data mining in collaborative games • Database support for collaborative games • Testing and prototyping of collaborative games • Context-aware gaming • Privacy and Security in collaborative games • Repository and content management of collaborative games • Tools (authoring, assessment, etc.) and sub-systems for collaborative games • Human-Computer Interaction (devices, methodologies and tools) to support collaboration • Serious games aimed at supporting collaboration • Animation and Virtual Reality in game design • Learning and Adaptation in Collaborative Games • Human, social and psychological aspects of games • Business modelling and economic aspects of collaborative games

PAPER SUBMISSION
You are invited to submit original and unpublished research works on above and other topics related to collaboration technologies and systems in games and gaming.  Submitted papers must not have been published or simultaneously submitted elsewhere.  Submission should include a cover page with authors' names, affiliation addresses, fax numbers, phone numbers, and email addresses.  Please, indicate clearly the corresponding author and include up to 6 keywords from the above list of topics and an abstract of no more than 400 words.  The full manuscript should be at most 8 pages using the two-column IEEE format.  Additional pages will be charged additional fee.  Short papers (up to 4 pages), poster papers and posters (please refer to  http://cts2014.cisedu.info/home/posters   for the posters submission details) will also be accepted for submission.  Please include page numbers on all preliminary submissions to make it easier for reviewers to provide helpful comments.

Submit a PDF copy of your full manuscript via the Workshop submission Web page at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cogames2014.    If the submission is for a short paper, a poster paper, or a poster, please indicate that on the manuscript as well.

Only PDF files will be accepted, uploaded to the Workshop link above.  Each paper will receive a minimum of three reviews.  Papers will be selected based on their relevance, contribution to advance the state if the art, originality, technical value and clarity of presentation.  Submission implies the willingness of at least one of the authors to register and present the paper, if accepted.  Authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their papers will be registered and presented at the workshop.

Accepted papers will be published in the Conference proceedings.  Instructions for final manuscript format and requirements will be posted on the CTS 2014 Conference web site.  It is our intent to have the proceedings formally published in hard and soft copies and be available at the time of the conference.  The proceedings is projected to be included in the IEEE Digital Library and indexed in major indexing services accordingly.

If you have any questions about paper submission or the workshop, please contact the workshop organizers.

http://cts2014.cisedu.info/2-conference/workshops/workshop-18-cogames

IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submissions: --------------------------------------- December 30, 2013 Acceptance Notification: --------------------------------- January 21, 2014 Camera Ready Papers and Registration Due: ---------  February 21, 2014 Conference Dates:  ---------------------------------------  May 19 - 23, 2014


WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS
Francesco Bellotti
   ELIOS Lab - DITEN
   University of Genoa, Via Opera Pia 11/a, 16145 Genoa, Italy
   Phone: + 39-010-3532227
   Fax:     + 39-010-3532795
   Skype:  f.bellotti
   Email:   franz@elios.unige.it

Kristen DiCerbo
     Pearson
     Center for Digital Experience and Analytics, 400 Center Ridge Drive, Austin, TX 78753, USA
     Voice:  +
     Fax:     +
     Email: kristen.dicerbo@pearson.com

C. Shaun Longstreet
      Center for Teaching and Learning
      Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI, USA
      Voice: +1 (414) 288-0263
      Fax:    +
      Email:  shaun.longstreet@marquette.edu, cslongstreet@gmail.com                                               

International Program Committee*:
All submitted papers will be reviewed by the workshop technical program committee members following similar criteria used in CTS 2014. • Aida Azadegan, University of the West of Scotland (UWS), U.K.
• Jannicke Baalsrud Hauge, University of Bremen, Germany • Riccardo Berta, University of Genoa, Italy • Rafael Bidarra, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands • Maira Carvalho, DITEN, University of Genoa, Italy • Brent Cowan, University of Ontario, Canada * • Alessandro De Gloria, University of Genoa, Italy • Giusy Fiucci, ORT, Paris, France • Casper Harteveld, Northeastern University, MA, USA • Andrew Hogue,  University of Ontario, Canada * • Sebastian Kelle, Stuttgart Media University, Germany • Ralf Klamma, RWTH Aachen, Germany • Theo Lim, Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, U.K.
• Michael Kickmaier-Rust, Technical University of Graz, Austria • Pablo Moreno Ger, University Complutense Madrid, Spain • Michela Mortara, CNR IMATI, Genoa, Italy • Magda Popescu, National Defence University "Carol I", Romania * • Margarida Romero, ESADE Barcelona, Spain • Ioana Stanescu, Advanced Distributed Learning,  Romania


For information or questions about Conference's paper submission, tutorials, posters, workshops, special sessions, exhibits, demos, panels and forums organization, doctoral colloquium, and any other information about the conference location, registration, paper formatting, etc., please consult the Conference's web site at URL: http://cts2014.cisedu.info/home   or contact one of the Conference's organizers or Co-Chairs.

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Special Issue on Recommender System Benchmarking - ACM TIST

Call for Papers

ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology

Special Issue on Recommender System Benchmarking

 http://tist.acm.org/CFPs/TIST-SI-RSB.html

Overview
------------
Recommender systems add value to vast content resources by matching users with items of interest. In recent years, immense progress has been made in recommendation techniques. The evaluation of these systems is still based on traditional information retrieval and statistics metrics, e.g. precision, recall, RMSE often not taking the use-case and situation of the system into consideration.

However, the rapid evolution of recommender systems in both their goals and their application domains foster the need for new evaluation methodologies and environments.

This special issue serves as a venue for work on novel, recommendation-centric benchmarking approaches taking the users utility, the business values and the technical constraints into consideration.

New evaluation approaches should evaluate both functional and non-functional requirements. Functional requirements go beyond traditional relevance metrics and focus on user-centered utility metrics, such as novelty, diversity and serendipity.

Non-functional requirements focus on performance (e.g., scalability of both model building and on-line recommendation phases) and reliability (e.g., consistency of recommendations with time, robustness to incomplete, erroneous or malicious input data).

Topics of Interests
------------------------
We invite the submission of high-quality manuscripts reporting relevant research in the area of benchmarking and evaluation of recommendation systems. The special issue welcomes submissions presenting technical, experimental, methodological and/or applicative contributions in this scope, addressing -though not limited to- the following topics:

• New metrics and methods for the quality estimation of recommender systems
• Mapping metrics to business goals and values
• Novel frameworks for the user-centric evaluation of recommender systems
• Validation of off-line methods with online studies
• Comparison of evaluation metrics and methods
• Comparison of recommender algorithms across multiple systems and domains
• Measuring technical constraints vs. accuracy
• Robustness of recommender systems to missing, erroneous or malicious data
• Evaluation methods in new application scenarios (cross domain, live/stream recommendation)
• New datasets for the evaluation of recommender systems
• Benchmarking frameworks
• Multiple-objective benchmarking
• Real benchmarking experiences (from benchmarking event organizers)

Submissions
-----------------
Manuscripts shall be sent through the ACM TIST electronic submission system at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tist (please select "Special Issue: Recommender System Benchmarking" as the manuscript type). Submissions shall adhere to the ACM TIST instructions and guidelines for authors available at the journal website: http://tist.acm.org.

The papers will be evaluated for their originality, contribution significance, soundness, clarity, and overall quality. The interest of contributions will be assessed in terms of technical and scientific findings, contribution to the knowledge and understanding of the problem, methodological advancements, and/or applicative value.

Important Dates

Paper submission due: January 20th, 2014
First round of reviews: March 15th, 2014
First round of revisions: April 15th, 2014
Second round of reviews: May 15th, 2014
Final round of revisions: June 15th, 2014
Final paper notification: July 15th, 2014
Camera-ready due: August 2014

Guest Editors
------------------
Paolo Cremonesi - Politecnico di Milano
• paolo.cremonesi@polimi.it
• http://home.dei.polimi.it/cremones/

Alan Said - CWI
• alansaid@acm.org
• http://www.alansaid.com

Domonkos Tikk - Gravity R&D
• domonkos.tikk@gravityrd.com
• http://www.tmit.bme.hu/tikk.domonkos

Michelle X. Zhou - IBM Research
• mzhou@us.ibm.com
• http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view.php?person=us-mzhou

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10 PhD positions in new Data Science Centre at Edinburgh, UK

 10 PhD places in new Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Science

 Web site: http://datascience.inf.ed.ac.uk/

 Application deadline: 27 January 2014 (first round)

The Edinburgh Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Data Science is
now inviting applications for 10 fully-funded PhD studentships, to
start in September 2014. Students with a strong background in computer
science, mathematics, physics, or engineering are particularly
encouraged to apply.

The CDT focuses on the computational principles, methods, and systems
for extracting knowledge from data. Large data sets are now generated
by almost every activity in science, society, and commerce - ranging
from molecular biology to social media, from sustainable energy to
health care. Data science asks: How can we efficiently find patterns
in these vast streams of data?  Many research areas have tackled parts
of this problem: machine learning focuses on finding patterns and
making predictions from data; ideas from algorithms and databases are
required to build systems that scale to big data streams; and separate
research areas have grown around different types of unstructured data
such as text, images, sensor data, video, and speech.  Recently, these
distinct disciplines have begun to converge into a single field called
data science.

The CDT is a 4-year programme: the first year provides Masters level
training in the core areas of data science, along with a significant
project. In years 2-4 students will carry out PhD research in Data
Science, guided by PhD supervisors from within the centre. The CDT is
funded by EPSRC and the University of Edinburgh.

Edinburgh has a large, world-class research community in data science
to support the work of the CDT student cohort.  The city of Edinburgh
has often been voted the 'best place to live in Britain', and has many
exciting cultural and student activities.

Because of constraints from funding agencies, there are different
rules for funding depending on your fee status:
   * UK and EU students: Full funding (fees and stipend) is available.
   * Non-EU students: Funding is significantly more competitive;  see
     http://datascience.inf.ed.ac.uk/apply/information-for-non-eu-students/
     for details.

See http://datascience.inf.ed.ac.uk/apply/ for further information and
application forms. Enquiries via datascience@inf.ed.ac.uk .

There are two deadlines for applications:

 * First round deadline for full consideration. Apply by 27 January
   2014. (Any non-EU candidates must apply by this date, as well as
   following the specific instructions for non-EU residents.)

 * Second round: Any remaining scholarships will be awarded in a
   second round of applications. The deadline for the second round is
   31 March 2014.

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WWW 2014 Workshop - 4th Workshop on Data Extraction and Object Search (DEOS’14)

DEOS 2014: Fourth Workshop on Data Extraction and Object Search (April 7) in conjunction with WWW'14, April 7-11, Seoul, South Korea.

http://diadem.cs.ox.ac.uk/deos14/

Important Dates
-----------------------------------------------------------
Paper submission: *Jan 7, 2014 (23:59 Hawaii Standard Time)* Paper notification: *Feb 4, 2014* Paper camera-ready copy: *Feb 12, 2014* (hard deadline) Workshop date: April 7, 2014
-----------------------------------------------------------

Description
-----------------------------------------------------------
The Fourth International Workshop on “Data Extraction and Object Search” (DEOS 2014) will take place as a satellite event of WWW 2014 in Seoul, South Korea, on April 7th, 2014.

Web data extraction is witnessing a renaissance. In an increasing number of applications such as price intelligence or predictive analytics, the value of data-driven approaches has been conclusively proven. However, the necessary data is often available only as HTML, e.g., in form of online shops of competitors that can serve as sources for pricing and offer data. DEOS is a regular forum for researchers and practitioners in data extraction and object search, to present and discuss ongoing work on data extraction and object search for products, events, reviews, and other types of structured data on the web.

This is the fourth installation of DEOS, the first held in Como in 2010, the second in Vienna in 2011, the third in Oxford in 2013. The workshop is supported by the ERC DIADEM grant (http://diadem.cs.ox.ac.uk/) and the Oxford Martin school (http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/). There is a small amount of travel support available from the sponsors.


Topics
-----------------------------------------------------------
This installment of the workshop places a particular emphasis on benchmarking and effective evaluation measures for data extraction.

The topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
* Large-scale data extraction approaches capable of dealing with a large number of websites without per-site supervision.
* Object identification and extraction approaches in domains such as products, events, reviews, forum posts, ...
* Reducing and simplifying supervision in wrapper induction and the use of crowdsourcing.
* Automatic crawling and exploration of web interfaces with a particular focus on highly-visual, scripted web applications.
* Information extraction meets data extraction including approaches that integrate information extraction, e.g., from product titles, with data extraction for mutual verification of the data.
* Automated data extraction approaches that identify wrappers fully automatically at high accuracy.
* Integration and cleaning of extracted web data for object search including approaches or tools for deduplication (intra- and inter-site) and for reconciliation of conflicting attribute values.
* Object search approaches and systems that provide a search interface to data extracted from the web.
* Evaluation, benchmarking, and replicability in web data extraction and object search.


Submissions
-----------------------------------------------------------

DEOS’14 welcomes the submission of theoretical, experimental, methodological as well as application papers. Benchmark papers are particularly encouraged and demonstration papers are also welcome.

Submitted papers should be 8 pages (4 pages for demo proposals, work in progress, or vision papers) maximum in length, including figures and references. The paper must be formatted as PDF according to style guidelines of ACM SIG Proceedings Template available here: http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates.

All papers should be submitted online on the workshop submission website: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=deos14.

Further information is available at http://diadem.cs.ox.ac.uk/deos14/.

Organization
-----------------------------------------------------------
Tim Furche, University of Oxford, <tim@furche.net>
Giorgio Orsi, University of Oxford, <giorgio.orsi@cs.ox.ac.uk>
Paolo Merialdo, Università Roma Tre, <merialdo@dia.uniroma3.it>
Valter Crescenzi, Università Roma Tre, <crescenz@dia.uniroma3.it>

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Deadline Extension - The 26th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'14)

The 26th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering
New paper submission deadline: 9 December 2013
Note count-down clock! 

http://delab.csd.auth.gr/caise2014/important_dates.php  

Call for Papers

Information Systems Engineering in Times of Crisis
http://delab.csd.auth.gr/caise2014/

Real-time information systems and overly complex financial products have been blamed as causes of recent financial crises. The IS Engineering community is treating such phenomena as challenges, to be addressed through research and improved practices. In particular, our community has begun to address the role of information systems in predicting, preventing, and reacting to crises of many different kinds: data-centric financial and fiscal dependency analysis of the globalized financial systems, resilience of critical infrastructures by information management, reaction to natural disasters such as fires, floods, earthquakes, etc. Due to the very nature of crises as unexpected events with broad and vast impact, IS Engineering challenges traditional wisdom and methodologies, as well as interactions between research and practice including stakeholders such as crisis victims.
CAiSE '14 will, as always, act as a forum of discussion that brings together researchers and practitioners in the field of IS Engineering. It will be the place to share mature research, ground-breaking ideas, and experience reports in our discipline.
CAiSE welcomes all submissions that fall in the domain of information systems engineering. This year, the conference extends a special welcome to papers that address the role of IS engineering in crisis situations. Four kinds of contributions are accepted: technical papers, empirical evaluation papers, reports of experience, and exploratory papers. The CAiSE topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

Methods, techniques and tools for IS engineering
•    Innovation and creativity in IS engineering
•    Enterprise architecture and enterprise modelling
•    Requirements engineering
•    Business process modeling, analysis and management
•    Requirements, models, and software reuse
•    Adaptation, evolution and flexibility issues
•    Domain engineering
•    IS in networked & virtual organizations
•    Method engineering
•    Knowledge, information, and data quality
•    Languages and models
•    Mining, monitoring and predicting
•    Variability and configuration
•    Matching, compliance and alignment issues
•    Conceptual design and modelling
•    Security
•    Service science

Innovative platforms, architectures and technologies for IS
•    Service-oriented architecture
•    Model-driven architecture
•    Component based development
•    Agent architecture
•    Distributed, mobile, and open architecture
•    Innovative database technology
•    Semantic web
•    IS and ubiquitous technologies
•    Adaptive and context-aware IS

Domain specific IS engineering:
•    Crisis Management
•    eGovernment
•    Enterprise applications (ERP, COTS)
•    Data warehouses and business intelligence
•    Workflow systems
•    Knowledge management systems
•    Content management systems

Important dates
•    Paper submission deadline: 9 December 2013
•    Tutorial submission deadline: 13 December 2013
•    Notification of acceptance: 17 February 2014
•    Conference, Workshops & Related Events: 16-20 June 2014

Author Guidelines
Types of contributions. We invite four types of original and scientific papers:
Formal and/or technical papers describe original solutions (theoretical, methodological or conceptual) in the field of IS engineering. A technical paper should clearly describe the situation or problem tackled, the relevant state of the art, the position or solution suggested and the potential - or, even better, the evaluated - benefits of the contribution.
Empirical evaluation papers evaluate existing problem situations or validate proposed solutions with scientific means, i.e. by empirical studies, experiments, case studies, simulations, formal analyses, mathematical proofs, etc. Scientific reflection on problems and practices in industry also falls into this category. The topic of the evaluation presented in the paper as well as its causal or logical properties must be clearly stated. The research method must be sound and appropriate.
Experience papers present problems or challenges encountered in practice, relate success and failure stories, or report on industrial practice. The focus is on 'what' and on lessons learned, not on an in-depth analysis of 'why'. The practice must be clearly described and its context must be given. Readers should be able to draw conclusions for their own practice.
Exploratory Papers can describe completely new research positions or approaches, in order to face to a generic situation arising because of new ICT tools or new kinds of activities or new IS challenges. They must describe precisely the situation and demonstrate how current methods, tools, ways of reasoning, or meta-models are inadequate. They must rigorously present their approach and demonstrate its pertinence and correctness to addressing the identified situation.
Submission Conditions. Papers should be submitted in PDF format. The results described must be unpublished and must not be under review elsewhere. Submissions must conform to Springer's LNCS format and should not exceed 15 pages, including all text, figures, references and appendices. Submissions not conforming to the LNCS format, exceeding 15 pages, or being obviously out of the scope of the conference, will be rejected without review. Information about the Springer LNCS format can be found at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html. Three to five keywords characterizing the paper should be indicated at the end of the abstract. The type of paper (technical/empirical evaluation/experience/exploratory paper) should be indicated in the submission.
Publication. Accepted papers will be presented at CAiSE'14 and published in the conference proceedings, which is published in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). Authors elected best papers from the conference will be invited to submit an expanded version for publication in the journal, Information Systems.

Venue
Thessaloniki is the second largest city of Greece, with a population of 1.000.000 people. Apart from its landmark, the White Tower, the city boasts important historical sites, museums and cultural activities. It is also known as a cosmopolitan and commercial center, with exceptional nightlife in its famous Ladadika quarter. The music scene in the city is vibrant and diverse and includes nightclubs, dance halls, discos, cafes and music bars, jazz clubs and more, along with a wealth of live performances, both musical and theatrical. In addition to important Byzantine and Archaeological museums within the city, travellers can visit the Archaeological site of Vergina (the capital of ancient Macedonia). This is the venue of Phillip's tomb (the father of Alexander the Great), a site full of remarkable treasures of art and culture. Also within a short distance (45 minutes by car) one can visit mount Olympus (the mountain of the ancient Gods) where "Dion" the holy city of ancient Macedonia is located. For these and many other reasons, Thessaloniki is the cultural capital of northern Greece! CAISE'2014 will be hosted at the MET Hotel (http://www.themethotel.gr), located very close to the historic center of Thessaloniki, 17 km from "Macedonia" airport. A block of rooms has been reserved for the conference registrants.

Organising Committee
Steering Committee
•    Barbara Pernici, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
•    Oscar Pastor, Universitat Politècnica València, Spain
•    John Krogstie, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
Advisory Committee
•    Arne Sølvberg, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway
•    Janis Bubenko Jr, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
•    Colette Rolland, University of Paris 1, France
General Chairs
•    Colette Rolland, University of Paris 1, France
•    Yannis Manolopoulos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
•    Haralambos Mouratidis, University of East London, UK
Program Board Chair
•    Eric Dubois, Public Research Center H. Tudor, Luxembourg
Program Chairs
•    Matthias Jarke, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
•    John Mylopoulos, University of Trento, Italy
•    Christoph Quix, Fraunhofer FIT, Germany
Tutorial and Panel Chairs
•    Jaelson Castro, University of Pernambuco, Brasil
•    Dimitri Karagiannis, University of Vienna, Austria
Workshops Chairs
•    Lazaros Iliadis, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece
•    Mike Papazoglou, University of Tilburg, The Netherlands
•    Klaus Pohl, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
Forum Chairs
•    Selmin Nurcan, University of Paris 1, France
•    Elias Pimenidis, University of East London, UK
Doctoral Consortium Chairs
•    Oscar Pastor, Universitat Politècnica València, Spain
•    Yannis Vassiliou, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Organizing Committee Chairs
•    Anastasios Gounaris, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
•    Apostolos Papadopoulos, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Publicity Chairs
•    Christos Kalloniatis, University of the Aegean, Greece
•    Lin Liu, Tsinghua University, China
•    Eric Yu, University of Totonto, Canada
•    Renata Guizzardi, Universidade Federal do Espirito Santo, Brasil
•    Naoufel Kraiem, Université de Manouba, Tunisia

Web and Social Media Master
•    Ioannis Karydis, Ionian University, Greece

See website for full details.

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WWW 2014 Workshop - 4th Joint Workshop on Web Quality (WebQuality 2014)

 

1st CALL FOR PAPERS

The 4th Joint WICOW/AIRWeb Workshop on Web Quality (WebQuality 2014)

Workshop to be held at the 23rd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW

2014) in Seoul, Korea

http://www.dl.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp/webquality2014/

IMPORTANT DATES

==============================
Jan 7, 2014: Paper submission deadline
Feb 4, 2014: Notification of acceptance
Feb 12, 2014: Camera ready copy deadline April 7, 2014: Workshop date
==============================

OBJECTIVES

The Web and social media are growing both in size and complexity, as well as
playing an increasing role in our lives. Finding relevant, timely and
trustworthy content in a sea of seemingly irrelevant chatter remains a
challenging research issue. On one hand, this workshop deals with the more
blatant and malicious attempts that deteriorate web quality such as spam,
plagiarism, or various forms of abuse and ways to prevent them or neutralize
their impact on users' experience. On the other hand, it will also provide a
venue for exchanging ideas on quantifying and modeling issues of content
quality, credibility and author reputation.

The objective of the workshop is to provide the research communities working
on web quality topics with a survey of current problems and potential solutions.
It presents an opportunity for close interaction between researchers and
practitioners who may be focused on isolated sub-areas. We also want to
gather crucial feedback for the academic community from participants
representing major industry players on how web content quality research can
contribute to practice.

TOPICS

Particular areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

Assessing the credibility of content and people on the web and social media
* Measuring quality of web content
* Uncovering distorted and biased content
* Modeling author identity, trust, and reputation
* Role of groups and communities
* Multimedia content credibility

Fighting spam, abuse, and plagiarism on the Web and social media
* Reducing web spam
* Reducing abuses of electronic messaging systems
* Detecting abuses in internet advertising
* Uncovering plagiarism and multiple-identity issues
* Promoting cooperative behavior in social networks
* Security issues with online communication

Other topics are listed on the workshop website.

We invite two kinds of submissions: (i) full papers and (ii) short papers.
Full papers are limited to 8 pages, while short papers are limited to 4 pages.
Papers should be written in English, formatted according to the ACM style
guide http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates
and submitted via https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=webquality2014
The accepted papers will appear in ACM Digital Library.

ORGANIZERS

Adam Jatowt (Kyoto University)
Carlos Castillo (Qatar Computing Research Institute)
James Caverlee (Texas A&M University)
Katsumi Tanaka (Kyoto University)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

see the website

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WWW 2014 Workshop - The 4th Making Sense of Microposts Workshop (#Microposts2014)

The 4th Making Sense of Microposts Workshop (#Microposts2014) at WWW 2014

http://www.scc.lancs.ac.uk/microposts2014

7 April 2014, Seoul, Republic of Korea


THEME
-------------------

Making Sense of Microposts: Big things come in small packages

Microposts, such as Twitter status updates, Instagram likes and photos and Foursquare checkins, form a notable part of published web content. Smart phones, after overtaking sales of personal computers in 2012, now play a significant role in enabling ubiquitous communication, and have contributed to the steep increase in publication of Microposts, via native mobile apps and mobile-specific web sites. The increase in Micropost publication is evident across Twitter, where 500 million posts are now published every day, up from 175 million in 2012. Facebook sees 30 billion pieces of content shared on it every month. Such statistics reflect the growing production and consumption of data by users and the widespread sharing of information through social networks. The utility of Microposts is such that we are now providing up-to-date information about a range of topics formed in disparate contexts, providing information about emerging events, online presence, emergency response and c!
rowd movement. Being able to make sense of Microposts therefore impacts on the ability to act upon information quickly and effectively, and aids the understanding of evolving user behaviour, events and public perception and opinion about their worlds.

The central objective of the #Microposts workshop is to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines to discuss and debate current efforts toward analysing and understanding Microposts. We define a Micropost as information published on the Web that is small in size (e.g. a Tweet, Facebook share, Instagram like) and that requires minimal effort to publish. Although individual Microposts are small, collectively they provide a rich source of current information about a range of topics across all walks of life. Gleaning information from such content effectively requires a degree of understanding of what is being discussed and, with very large amounts, semi- to fully automated analytical and extraction approaches.
The workshop aims to provide a forum to enable discussion and hence, improve understanding of social and cultural phenomena that influence the publication and reuse of Microposts; and to discuss applications of Micropost data in a variety of contexts, including emergency response, crowd and event tracking, public opinion and sentiment analysis. Enabling the understanding and application of Micropost content requires analytical techniques and tools that function at scale and that can handle the high rate at which Microposts are published. The workshop invites submissions that deal with publication rate and scale, and approaches that facilitate understanding of Microposts through their semantics and where available, contextual information.

Microposts are both a technical and a social phenomenon, and the nature of the challenge related to their treatment is therefore multi-disciplinary. We continue to promote a multidisciplinary workshop, as achieved in the past three in the series, by also encouraging social scientists and other non-Computer Science researchers to submit work that looks at the theories behind Micropost usage and communication through this medium. The workshop also encourages demonstration of practical application of the results of analysis of Micropost data, both within the research community and in everyday, real-world scenarios. We encourage submissions using this and last year’s challenge data for contributions to the main track.



TOPICS OF INTEREST
-------------------

The workshop will focus on topics including, but not exclusive to, the three areas below:

Data mining from Microposts
-Emergent semantics
-Opinion mining, sentiment and sentic analysis -Network analysis and community detection -Influence detection and social contagion modelling -Prediction approaches -Linking Microposts into the Web of Data -Semantic entity disambiguation

Social & Web Science Studies
-Collective awareness
-Education & citizen empowerment, data journalism -Civil action, media & politics -Political and polemical aspects of Microposts -Ethics, legal and privacy issues -Psychological profiles and psychological aspects of Micropost-based interactions -Cultural and regional differences in access and use

Applications
-Collective intelligence, including user profiling, personalisation & recommendation -Business analytics & market intelligence -Event & topic detection and tendency tracking -Microposts as second screen to TV -Geo-localized, Micropost-based services -Public consensus & citizen participation -Security, emergency response & health -Linking social and physical signals, in, e.g., crowd tracking




ENTITY EXTRACTION & DISAMBIGUATION CHALLENGE
----------------------------

#Microposts2014 will host an 'Entity Extraction & Disambiguation Challenge', where participants must label Microposts in a given dataset with the entities referenced and their semantic web URIs. Existing entity extraction and disambiguation tools are intended for use over news corpora and similar document-based corpora with relatively long length. The aim of the challenge is to foster research into novel, more accurate entity extraction and disambiguation for (much shorter) Micropost data. Detailed information on how to enter the challenge will be provided in a separate call for challenge submissions as well as on the workshop website.



WORKSHOP STRUCTURE
-------------------

A keynote address from an invited speaker will open the day. This will be followed by paper presentations. We will hold a poster and demo session to trigger further, in-depth interaction between workshop participants. The last set of presentations will be brief overviews of selected submissions to the Entity Extraction & Disambiguation Challenge The workshop will close with the presentation of awards for the best paper and the highest ranking challenge submission.


SUBMISSIONS
------------

* Full papers: 8 pages ACM SIG format
* Short and position papers: 4 pages ACM SIG format
* Demos & Posters: 2 pages ACM SIG format
* Challenge extended abstracts: 5 pages Springer LNCS format

Main track submissions should be prepared according to the ACM SIG Proceedings Template (see http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates), and should include author names and affiliations, and 3-5 keywords.
Further detail for challenge submissions will be provided in a separate call.

Submission is via the EasyChair Conference System, at: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=microposts2014. Where a submission includes additional material submission this should be made as a single, unencrypted zip file that includes a plain text file listing its contents.

Each submission will receive, in addition to a meta-review, at least 2 peer reviews, with full papers at least 3 peer reviews.

The workshop proceedings will be published through the ACM Digital Library.

IMPORTANT DATES
----------------

Paper Submission deadline: ***7 Jan 2014***
Paper Notification: 4 Feb 2014
Camera-ready (hard) deadline (short & long papers): 12 Feb 2014

(all deadlines 23:59 Hawaii Time)

Workshop program issued: 15 Mar 2014
Main track proceedings to be published by ACM
Workshop - 7 April 2014 (Registration open to all)



CONTACT
-------

E-mail: microposts2014@easychair.org
Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/#!/home.php?sk=group_180472611974910
Facebook Public Event page: http://www.facebook.com/events/116134955169543
Twitter hashtag: #microposts2014
W3C Microposts Community Group: http://www.w3.org/community/microposts


ORGANISERS
-----------

Matthew Rowe, Lancaster University, UK
Milan Stankovic, Université Paris-Sorbonne & Sépage, France
Aba-Sah Dadzie, University of Birmingham, UK



CHALLENGE EVALUATION COMMITTEE:
--------------------------------

Challenge Chairs:
A. Elizabeth Cano, Aston University, UK
Giuseppe Rizzo, Università degli studi di Torino, Italy

Dataset Chair:
Andrea Varga, The University of Sheffield, UK

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ACIS Annual Report 2012-2013

Please find the report of the Advanced Community Information Systems (ACIS) group at RWTH Aachen University. It covers our activities from October 2012 to September 2013.

Advanced Community Information Systems Group (ACIS) Annual Report 2013 from Ralf Klamma

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ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR 2014)

ACM International 

Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR) 

Glasgow, UK,

1st - 4th April 2014  

http://www.icmr2014.org/

Important dates

***** DECEMBER 2, 2013 – Paper Submission, Full and Short *****

* December 14, 2013 – Doc Symposium
* December 14, 2013 – PhD Showcase
* December 15, 2013 - Tutorial Proposals
* January 13, 2014 - Demonstrations

===================================
The Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR)
offers a great opportunity for exchanging leading-edge multimedia retrieval
ideas among researchers, practitioners and other potential users of
multimedia retrieval systems. ICMR 2014 is seeking original high quality
submissions addressing innovative research in the broad field of multimedia
retrieval. We wish to highlight significant contributions addressing the
main problem of search and retrieval but also the related and equally
important issues of multimedia content management, user interaction, and
community-based management. The conference will be held in Glasgow during
1-5 April 2014.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
* Content- and context-based indexing, search and retrieval of images and video
* Multimedia content search and browsing on the Web
* Advanced descriptors and similarity metrics for audio, image, video and 3D data
* Multimedia content analysis and understanding
* Semantic retrieval of visual content
* Learning and relevance feedback in media retrieval
* Query models, paradigms, and languages for multimedia retrieval
* Multimodal media search
* Human perception based multimedia retrieval
* Studies of information-seeking behavior among image/video users
* Affective/emotional interaction or interfaces for image/video retrieval
* HCI issues in multimedia retrieval
* Evaluation of multimedia retrieval systems
* High performance multimedia indexing algorithms
* Community-based multimedia content management
* Applications of Multimedia Retrieval: Medicine, Multimodal Lifelogs, Satellite Imagery, etc.
* Image/video summarization and visualization

Based on the Chinese Computing Federation Conference Ranking (2013):
ACM ICMR is the #1 Multimedia Retrieval conference in the world and
the#4 conference in the category of multimedia and graphics.

All papers should be prepared and submitted according to the following
guidelines.

Paper format
===============================
Full papers must not exceed 8 pages in total. Papers must be formatted
according to ACM guidelines and must be in PDF format. Papers exceeding the
limits will be rejected without review.

Submissions
===============================
Submitted papers must describe unpublished original work, emphasizing
completed or advanced research and a parallel submission to other venues
should be clearly indicated to the program committee.
Submissions are double-blind and will be reviewed by at least three program
committee members.

Double-blind Review
===============================
The ICMR uses a double-blind review process for regular paper selection.
Authors should not know the names of the reviewers of their papers, and
reviewers should not know the name(s) of the authors.
Please prepare your paper in a way that preserves anonymity of the authors.

* Do not put your name(s) under the title.
* Avoid using phrases such as "our previous work" when referring to earlier
publications by the authors.
* Remove information that may identify the authors in the acknowledgments
(e.g., co-workers and grant IDs).
* Check supplemental material (e.g., titles in the video clips, or
supplementary documents) for information that may identify the authors
identity.
* Avoid providing links to websites that identify the authors.

Conference organization
=======================

General Chairs
Joemon Jose (University of Glasgow, UK)
Keith van Rijsbergen (University of Cambridge, UK)

TPC Chairs
Mohan Kankanhalli (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Stefan Rueger (The Open University, UK)
R. Manmatha (University of Massachusetts, USA)

Industry and Practitioners Day
Rong Yan (Facebook, USA)
Johan Oomen (Sound and Vision, Netherlands)
Alejandro Jaimes (Yahoo! Labs, Spain)

Special session Chairs
Rainer Lienhart (University of Augsburg, Germany)
James Wang (Penn State University, USA)
Jingdong Wang (Microsoft Research Asia, China)

Workshop Chairs
Benoit Huet (EURECOM, France)
Chong-Wah Ngo (City University HK)
Vincent Oria (New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA)

Demonstrations Chairs
Marcel Worring (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Ichiro Ide (Nagoya University, Japan)

Tutorials
Cees Snoek (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Manjunath B. S. (University of California, USA)
Thierry Urruty (Département XLIM-SIC, France)

Doctoral Symposium
Xuelong Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences, China)
Stephane Marchand-Maillet (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Susanne Boll (University of Oldenburg, Germany)

Panels Chairs
Shin'ichi Satoh (Japanese National Institute, Japan)
John Smith (IBM, USA)

PhD student showcase
Jialie Shen (Singapore Management University, Singapore )
Ioannis Patras (Queen Margaret University London, UK)

Brave New Ideas
Nicu Sebe (University of Trento, Italy)
Alexander Hauptmann (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
Tat-Seng Chua (National University of Singapore, Singapore)

Proceedings Chairs
Robert Villa (University of Sheffield, UK)
Frank Hopfgartner (Technical University Berlin, Germany)

Publicity Chairs
Joao Magalhaes (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)
Jun Wang (University College London, UK)

Sponsorship Chairs
Noel O'Connor (Dublin City University, Ireland)
Yiannis (Ioannis) Kompatsiaris (ITI, Greece)

Local Organizing Committee
Martin Halvey (University of Caledonian, UK)
Philip McParlane (University of Glasgow, UK)

Website
Philip McParlane (University of Glasgow, UK)

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Learning Analytics & Knowledge (LAK) DATA CHALLENGE 2014

 

LAK DATA CHALLENGE 2014

http://lak.linkededucation.org

collocated with Learning Analytics & Knowledge 2014

The LAK Dataset (http://lak.linkededucation.org/) provides access to
structured metadata from research publications in the field of learning
analytics. Beyond merely publishing the data, we are actively
encouraging its innovative use and exploitation as part of a public LAK
Data Challenge sponsored by the European Project LinkedUp
(http://linkedup-project.eu<http://linkedup-project.eu/>), co-located with the Learning Analytics &
Knowledge Conference 2014 conference in Indianapolis, Indiana (US) in
March 2014.


IMPORTANT DATES
---------------

- 20th January, 2014: submission deadline
- 3rd February, 2014: notification deadline
- 24-28 March, 2014: LAK2014 Conference.


CHALLENGE OBJECTIVE
-------------------
What do analytics on learning analytics tell us? How can we make sense
of this emerging fieldís historical roots, current state, and future
trends, based on how its members report and debate their research?
Challenge submissions should exploit the LAK Dataset for a meaningful
purpose. This may include submissions which cover one or more of the
following, non-exclusive list of topics:

- Analysis & assessment of the emerging LAK community in terms of
topics, people, citations or connections with other fields
- Innovative applications to explore, navigate and visualise the dataset
(and/or its correlation with other datasets)
- Usage of the dataset as part of recommender systems
- Analysis of the evolution of the LAK discipline
- Improvement and enrichment of the LAK Dataset


SUBMISSION FORMAT
-----------------
Each submission should be accompanied by a 2-4 page paper (ACM format,
see http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates) that
contains at least:

- an abstract of the submission
- motivation: which purposes does your system or dataset serve?
- description of your dataset (e.g. if the LAK data is combined with
other datasets), system or demo
- a link to your dataset and/or system or demo

Please use the EasyChair submission form
(https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lakdatachallenge2014) for
all submissions.


EVALUATION
----------
There will be a light review by members of the challenge committee to
pre-select submissions for presentation. During the LAK conference and
based on the presentations, the challenge winner(s) will be identified
based on votes by the audience and the committee.


PUBLICATION, PRESENTATION & AWARDS
----------------------------------
Accepted submissions will be published in online proceedings and
presented during an interactive LAK Data workshop collocated with the
LAK 2014 conference in Indianapolis, Indiana (US). The three best papers
of each workshop will be invited to a Special Issue in the Journal for
Learning Analytics. In addition, there will be awards for the winning
submissions with very cool prizes (further details to be announced)!


CHALLENGE COMMITTEE
-------------------

- Mathieu D'Aquin (The Open University, United Kingdom)
- Stefan Dietze (L3S Research Center, Germany)
- Hendrik Drachsler (Open Universiteit Nederland, Netherlands)
- Eelco Herder (L3S Research Center, Germany)
- Davide Taibi (Institute for Educational Technologies CNR, Italy)


CONTACT
--------
lakdatachallenge2014@easychair.org<mailto:lakdatachallenge2014@easychair.org>

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The 2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM '14)

ASONAM '14

The 2014 IEEE/ACM International Conference

on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining

Beijing China August 17-20, 2014

Home Page: www.asonam2014.org

Call for Papers

The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network
Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) provides a premier interdisciplinary
forum to bring together researchers and practitioners from all social
networking analysis and mining related fields for presentation of
original research results, as well as exchange and dissemination of
innovative, practical development experiences. ASONAM 2014 seeks to
address important challenging problems with a specific focus on the
emerging trends and industry needs associated with social networking
analysis and mining. The conference solicits experimental and
theoretical findings along with their real-world applications.

General areas of interest to ASONAM 2014 include the design, analysis
and implementation of social networking theory, systems and
applications from information science, mathematics, communications,
business administration, sociology, psychology, anthropology, applied
linguistics, biology and medicine. More specialized topics within
ASONAM include, but are not limited to:

* Agent based social simulation and computational models
* Anomaly detection in social network evolution
* Application of social network analysis and mining
* Community discovery and analysis in large scale online/offline social networks
* Connection between biological similarities and social network formulation
* Contextual social network analysis and mining
* Crime network analysis
* Crowd sourcing
* Cyber anthropology
* Dark Web
* Data models for social networks and social media
* Data protection inside communities
* Economical impact of social network discovery
* Evolution of communities/patterns on the Web and in large organizations
* Impact of social networks on recommendations systems
* Incorporating social information in query processing and query optimization
* Information acquisition and establishment of social relations
* Influence of cultural aspects on the formation of communities
* Large-scale graph algorithms for social network analysis
* Misbehavior detection in communities
* Migration between communities
* Multi-actor/multiple-relationship networks
* Multi-agent based social network modeling and analysis
* Open source intelligence
* Pattern presentation for end-users and experts
* Personalization for search and for social interaction
* Political impact of social network discovery
* Privacy, security and civil liberty issues
* Recommendations for product purchase, information acquisition and
establishment of social relations
* Scalability of social networking/search algorithms
* Social and cultural anthropology
* Social geography
* Social psychology of information diffusion
* Spatial/knowledge networks
* Statistical modeling of large networks
* Trust networks and evolution of trust
* Visual representation of dynamic social networks

Key Dates
*********

Full paper submission deadline: April 9, 2014
Notification of acceptance: June 9, 2014
Camera-ready papers due: June 24, 2014
Conference events: August 17-20, 2014

Paper Submissions
*****************

Papers reporting original and unpublished research results pertaining
to the above topics are solicited. The papers will reviewed by a
minimum of two subject experts. Full paper manuscripts must be in
English with a maximum length of 8 pages using the IEEE CPS two-column
template. Papers should be submitted to the Conference Web site:
https://wi-lab.com/cyberchair/2014/asonam14/cbc_index.php. IEEE will
retain the copyright for accepted papers and the IEEE copyright form
found at
http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/copyrightmai
n.html
will therefore have to be completed. Papers will be accepted for the
conference based on the reviewers comments on their originality,
timeliness, significance, relevance, and clarity of presentation. If
the paper is accepted, the paper will appear in the proceedings of the
conference if one author presents the paper at the conference and at
least one author register as a full conference participant.

Publications
************

Accepted and presented papers will be included in the ASONAM 2014
Conference Proceedings and forwarded for inclusion in IEEE Computer
Society Digital Library (CSDL), IEEE Xplore and the ACM Digital
Library. The conference proceedings will be submitted for EI indexing
through INSPEC by the IEEE.

ASONAM 2014 Organizing Committee
********************************

Honorary Chair:
Binxing Fang, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Conference Chairs:
Yan Jia, National University of Defence Technology, China
Jon Rokne, University of Calgary, Canada

Program Committee Chairs:
Xindong Wu, University of Vermont, USA and Hefei University of Technology, China
Martin Ester, Simon Fraser University, Canada
Guandong Xu, University of Technology Sydney, Australia

Steering Committee Chair:
Reda Alhajj, University of Calgary, Canada

Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Daniel Zeng, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and University of Arizona
Jie Cao, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, China

Workshops Chairs:
Bettina Berendt, University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium
Jie Tang, Tsinghua University, China
Wolfgan Nejdl, Leibniz Universitat Hannover, Germany

Tutorial Chairs:
V. S. Subrahmanian, University of Maryland, USA
Meng Wang, Hefei University of Technology, China
Carson Leung, Manitoba University, Canada

Panels Chairs:
Alvin Chin, Nokia Research, China
Jing Xu, Peking University, China
Hiroyuki Kitagawa, Tsukuba University, Japan

Demos Chairs:
Tansel Ozyer, TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey
Wei Wang, University of New South Wales, Australia

Publicity Chairs:
Nitin Agarwal, University of Arkansas, USA
Panagiotis Karampelas, Hellenic American University, Greece
Wookey Lee, Inha University, Korea

Publication Chairs:
Xiaohui (Daniel) Tao, University of Southern Queensland, Australia
Min-Yuh Day, Tamkang University, Taiwan

Registration Chair
QIngshun Meng, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China

Finance Chair
Reda Alhajj, University of Calgary, Canada
Lu Xu, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, China

Web Chair:
Zhiang Wu, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, China

Further Information:
********************

asonam2014@gmail.com

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