SIGIR 2007 News Letter for April

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                 SIGIR 2007 News letter for April 2007

            The 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference
                       23-27 July 2007, Amsterdam
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In this edition:

  1. SIGIR 2007 opens on-line registration and hotel reservations
  2. Preliminary programme on-line
  3. Register now for one of the SIGIR tutorials and/or workshops
  4. SIGIR 2007 opens My SIGIR community portal
  5. Student and New Researcher Travel Support
  6. New golden sponsor: Ask.com
  7. Opportunity for student volunteers
  8. SIGIR to remember Professor Karen Sparck Jones at the conference
  9. New silver sponsor: Matrixware 
 10. New bronze sponsors: Endeca, Pascal Network, and WCC 
 11. MultimediaN sponsors SIGIR Industry Event
 12. Important Dates

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1. SIGIR 2007 opens on-line registration and hotel reservations

On-line registration for SIGIR 2007 in Amsterdam is possible now. 
SIGIR offers reduced registration fee if registration and payment is 
received before 15 June 2007. Go to 
  http://www.sigir2007.org/registration.html
For on-line hotel reservations please go to 
  http://www.sigir2007.org/accommodation.html 

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2. Preliminary programme on-line

We have put the accepted papers (http://www.sigir2007.org/papers.html), 
posters and demonstrations (http://www.sigir2007.org/posters.html) 
on-line. 

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3. Register now for one of the SIGIR tutorials and/or workshops

SIGIR 2007 offers the following tutorials:

 - "Conducting Interactive IR User Studies" by Diane Kelly
 - "Introduction to Web Retrieval and Advertising" by Ricardo 
   Baeza-Yates, Andrei Broder, and Prabhakar Raghaven 
 - "Introduction to Text Mining" by David D. Lewis
 - "The Probabilistic Relevance Model: BM25 and Beyond" by Hugo 
   Zaragoza and Stephen Robertson 
 - "Cross-Language Information Access" by Jianqiang Wang and Daqing He 
 - "Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning for IR" by Yi Zhang and 
   Rong Jin 
 - "XML Retrieval: Integrated IR-DB Challenges and Solutions" by Sihem 
   Amer-Yahia, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Mariano Consens, and Mounia Lalmas 
 - "Introduction to Recommender Systems" by Joseph A. Konstan 

SIGIR offers the following workshops. Deadline for submitting papers
to the workshops is end of May (check the workshop's web sites)

 - Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval
 - Web Information Seeking and Interaction
 - Plagiarism Analysis, Authorship Identification, and Near-Duplicate 
   Detection
 - Improving Web retrieval for non-English queries
 - Multimedia Information Retrieval
 - Large scale distributed Information Retrieval
 - Information retrieval and applications of graphical models
 - Focused Retrieval
 - Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech

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4. SIGIR 2007 opens My SIGIR community portal

SIGIR 2007 offers its MySIGIR community portal to all registered 
participants at: http://my.sigir2007.org 
MySIGIR is a community portal where you can find tips on visiting 
Amsterdam, create and maintain a personal SIGIR blog/notebook, post 
questions, look for travelmates, discuss various aspects of the 
conference, download slides and pictures, get travel directions and 
much much more. Students that wish to share a room may find fellow 
students on MySIGIR. All registered participants receive an account 
to access the forum.

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5. Student and New Researcher Travel Support

SIGIR invites applications for small awards to help cover the cost of 
travel, subsistence, and registration to the SIGIR 2007 conference. 
Preference will be given to a) an applicant who is the principal author 
of a paper and will be presenting the paper at SIGIR, or b) an applicant 
who is attending of the doctoral consortium. Principal authors of 
posters or demos who are presenting their work may also receive funding 
if budget permits. Authors who are not presenting will not be funded. 
It is assumed that applicants have only limited alternative travel 
support. The deadline for applying for travel support is May 7. 
Decisions will be announced by May 21. For more information, see:
http://www.sigir2007.org/news/20070410studenttravelsupport.html

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6. New golden sponsor: Ask.com

We are excited to announce our third golden sponsor: Ask.com. 
Ask.com's innovative search technologies deliver fast and relevant 
information for millions of people every day.
http://www.ask.com/

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7. Opportunity for student volunteers

SIGIR 2007 will need a group of volunteers to help out with the 
local arrangements. You will be assigned 4 shifts of approximately 5 
hours and will be able to attend the remainder of the conference free. 
For more information read: 
http://www.sigir2007.org/news/20070423volunteers.html

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8. SIGIR to remember Professor Karen Sparck Jones at the conference 

Karen Sparck Jones, who was invited to give a keynote speech at SIGIR 
2007, passed away on 4 April aged 71. Karen will be dearly missed. 
For more information:
http://www.sigir2007.org/news/20070405karensparckjones.html

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9. New silver sponsor: Matrixware

Matrixware information services is SIGIR's new silver sponsor.
Founded in Vienna in 2005, Matrixware, currently employs 25 people. A 
team consisting of computer scientists, mathematicians, linguists and 
other specialists is developing cutting-edge solutions for the field of 
intellectual property research. For the first time, new indexing 
technologies facilitate automatization of large parts of the information 
retrieval process, from data processing to information extraction in 
both structured and unstructured documents. A pilot study in cooperation 
with the European Patent Organisation (EPO) found a significant 
reduction in labour can be achieved by using automated processes. 
Furthermore, the adoption of recent insights from the field of 
computational linguistics enables the introduction of new functions and 
services. For her pioneer achievements in this area, Matrixware has 
been granted substantial funding from the Austrian Ministry of Science 
in 2005. http://www.matrixware.com

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10. New bronze sponsors: Endeca, Pascal Network, and WCC

Endeca, a leading search and information access platform provider, 
combines cutting-edge search with discovery and analysis capabilities 
to help answer high-value questions with unprecedented ease and 
confidence. The Endeca Information Access Platform unites disparate 
data sources, providing information in context, while featuring the 
security, performance, reliability and scalability required of the most 
demanding enterprise and Web environments. Customers like ABN AMRO, 
Boeing, Cox Newspapers, IBM, The Home Depot, John Deere, The Library 
of Congress, and Wal-Mart rely on Endeca to support information-
intensive business processes, ranging from regulatory compliance to 
e-commerce to knowledge management to strategic sourcing to human 
capital management.  http://endeca.com

The PASCAL network is the European Commission's IST-funded Network 
of Excellence for Multimodal Interfaces. There are 54 other sites in 
the network. The objective is to build a Europe-wide Distributed 
Institute which will pioneer principled methods of pattern analysis, 
statistical modelling and computational learning as core enabling 
technologies for multimodal interfaces that are capable of natural 
and seamless interaction with and among individual human users.
http://www.pascal-network.org

WCC is a high-end software company, based in Utrecht, NL and Palo 
Alto, USA. WCC automates the search and match process by providing 
more accurate and intelligent results. WCC's flagship product ELISE 
helps businesses and governments let their customers find the people, 
products, or services that best fit their require ments. WCC's 
technology is typically used in the employment arena, content 
management, eCommerce and Identity Matching (biometrics).
http://www.wcc-group.com

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11. MultimediaN sponsors SIGIR Industry Event

MultimediaN will sponsor the new SIGIR Industry Event. The Industry 
Event, which is organised in co-operation with BCS-IRSG, targets an 
audience interested in industrial strength indexing and search 
technology with a program comprised of a mix of in-depth expert talks, 
vendor presentations and IR challenge case descriptions presented by IR 
practitioners. http://www.sigir2007.org/industryevent.html

MultimediaN is a public-private non-profit organization where the 
scientific world cooperates with industrial and other non-profit 
institutions. Its management team encourages the organization of the 
SIGIR Industry Event in their efforts to bring together practitioner's, 
industry and academics. http://www.multimedian.nl

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12. Important Dates

May 25 2007:       Submission dead line for most workshops (check the
                   individual workshops web sites via 
                   http://www.sigir2007.org/workshops.html)
June 15 2007:      Dead line for early registration with reduced fee.
July 23-27, 2007:  Conference in Amsterdam

See also:    http://www.sigir2007.org
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Received on Monday, 23 April 2007 07:57:36 UTC