Title: Recommender Systems: Algorithms and Evaluation

Organizer(s):

Ian Soboroff ian@cs.umbc.edu
Charles Nicholas nicholas@cs.umbc.edu
Michael J. Pazzani pazzani@ics.uci.edu

Call for Participation Deadline: May 30, 1999.

URL for more information: http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~ian/sigir99-rec/

Brief Desciption:

The theme of the workshop is moving to the next phase of recommender systems research, from the basic "how do we do it" to "how can we do it better", and "how do we know that it's better". We will bring together researchers and practitioners involved in developing, testing, and fielding recommender systems. The workshop will provide a forum for discussing current practice and recent research results, and develop a roadmap for future recommender systems research.

Title: Evaluation of Web Document Retrieval

Organizers:

• Maristella Agosti agosti@dei.unipd.it
• Massimo Melucci melo@dei.unipd.it

Call for Participation Deadline:
Position papers and statements of interest are due June 18th. (Note: deadline moved up from June 11th.)

URL for more information: http://www.dei.unipd.it/~irpd/sigir99/

Brief Desciption:

In this workshop we will investigate in depth the evaluation of the use of diverse content descriptive data (e.g. metadata) and search strategies for Web document retrieval.

Topics include, but are not limited to, innovative evaluation methodologies concerning:

• the use of metadata and other content descriptive data,
• browsing and querying Web documents,
• the construction of Web document collections, and
• search engines and search tools.

Title: MultiMedia Indexing and Retrieval

Organizer(s):

• Rohini Srihari rohini@cedar.buffalo.edu
• Zhongfei Zhang zhongfei@cedar.buffalo.edu
• R. Manmatha manmatha@cs.umass.edu
• S. Ravela ravela@cs.umass.edu

Call for Participation Deadline: June 18, 1999.

URL for more information: http://www.cedar.buffalo.edu/sigir99/

Brief Desciption:

This workshop is a follow-up to last year's very successful workshop on the same topic. Since the field is advancing so rapidly, it was felt that an annual workshop would be worthwhile.

The focus is on the required functionality, techniques, and evaluation criteria for multimedia information retrieval systems. Researchers have been investigating content-based retrieval from non-text sources such as images, audio and video. Initially, the focus of these efforts were on content analysis and retrieval techniques tailored to a specific media; more recently, researchers have started to combine attributes from various media. The goal of multimedia IR systems is to handle general queries such as "find outdoor pictures or video of Clinton and Gore discussing environmental issues". Answering such queries requires intelligent exploitation of both text/speech and visual content. Multimedia IR is a very broad area covering both infrastructure issues (e.g. efficient storage criteria, networking, client-server models) and intelligent content analysis and retrieval.

Title: Exploratory Workshop on Music Information Retrieval

Organizer(s):

• J. Stephen Downie jdownie@uiuc.edu
• David Huron huron.1@osu.edu
• Craig Nevill-Manning nevill@cs.rutgers.edu

Call for Participation Deadline: July 1, 1999 for proposals; July 15, 1999 for materials.

URL for more information: http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/~jdownie/cfp99.html

Brief Desciption:

With this workshop we hope to bring together Music Information Retrieval (MIR) researchers; Information Retrieval (IR) researchers; computer scientists; musicologists; music bibiliographers; music, digital, and general librarians; music providers and industry members; in a forum exlusively devoted to issues pertaining to Music IR. We present this workshop in order to:

1. Foster the development of methods and technologies for content-based Music Information Retrieval (MIR) systems by encouraging communication among all those with an interest in MIR, either as users, providers, researchers, or developers.
2. Foster a framework for future fruitful research into MIR by having participants explore consensus opinion on the establishment of research priorities, inter-disciplinary collaborations, evaluation standards, test collections, resource sharing, funding opportunities, communication channels, etc.