The 3rd Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web (WICOW 2009) will be held on April 20th or 21st, 2009, in conjunction with the 18th World Wide Web Conference in Madrid, Spain!

* WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION*

As computers and computer networks become more common, a huge amount of information, such as that found in Web documents, has been accumulated and circulated. Such information gives many people a framework for organizing their private and professional lives. However, in general, the quality control of Web content is insufficient due to low publishing barriers. In result there is a lot of mistaken or unreliable information on the Web that can have detrimental effects on users. This situation calls for technology that would facilitate judging the trustworthiness of content and the quality and accuracy of the information that users encounter on the Web. Such technology should be able to handle a wide range of tasks: extracting credible information related to a given topic, organizing this information, detecting its provenance, clarifying background, facts, and other related opinions and the distribution of them, and so on. The problem of Web information reliability and Web data quality has become also apparent in the view of the recent emergence of many popular Web 2.0 applications, the growth of the so-called Deep Web and the ubiquity of Internet advertising.

* TOPICS *

The aim of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussion on issues related to information credibility criteria and the process of its evaluation. We invite submissions on any aspect of information credibility on the Web. Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Information credibility evaluation and its applications
• Web content analysis for credibility evaluation
• Author’s intent detection
• Credibility of Web search results
• Search models and applications for trustworthy content on the Web
• Conflicting opinion detection
• Online media and news credibility
• Multimedia content credibility
• Credibility evaluation of user-generated content (e.g., Wikipedia, question answering sites)
• Information credibility evaluation in social networks and Web 2.0 applications
• Analysis of information dissemination on the Web (e.g., in blogosphere)
• Spatial and temporal aspects in information credibility on the Web
• Information credibility theory and fundamentals
• Estimation of information age, provenance and validity
• Estimation of author’s and publisher’s reputation
• Sociological and psychological aspects of information credibility estimation
• Users study for information credibility evaluation
• Persuasive technologies
• Information credibility in online advertising and Internet monetization
• Web spam detection
• Data consistency and provenance
• Processing uncertain data and information

* KEYNOTE *

Title: User Generated Content: How Good it is?

Speaker: Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Yahoo! Research)

Abstract: See website.

* IMPORTANT DATES *

February 3, 2009 - Page submission deadline
February 26, 2009 - Notification of acceptance
March 6, 2009 - Camera ready deadline
April 20 or 21, 2009 - Workshop

* SUBMISSION *

Submissions should be sent in English in PDF format. Papers should adhere to ACM formatting guidelines and be no longer than 8 pages. They must be original and have not been submitted for publication elsewhere. We encourage also submission of position papers outlining interesting research directions.

* ORGANIZATION *

Katsumi Tanaka (Kyoto University, Japan)
Xiaofang Zhou (University of Queensland, Australia)
Adam Jatowt (Kyoto University, Japan)

Program Committee:

Witold Abramowicz (Poznan University of Economics, Poland)
Sourav S Bhowmick (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
Yunbo Cao (Microsoft Research Asia, China)
James Caverlee (Texas A&M University, USA)
David Danielson (Stanford University, USA)
Jean-Yves Delort (Macquarie University, Australia)
Ke Deng (University of Queensland, Australia)
Pavel Dmitriev (Yahoo!, USA)
Rino Falcone (CNR, Italy)
Marta Indulska (University of Queensland, Australia)
Kentaro Inui (NAIST, Japan)
Daxin Jiang (Microsoft Research Asia, China)
Yoshikiyo Kato (NICT, Japan)
Nick Koudas (University of Toronto, Canada)
Marek Kowalkiewicz (SAP Research, Australia)
Sadao Kurohashi (Kyoto University, Japan)
Chen Li (UC Irvine, USA)
Ee-Peng Lim (Singapore Management University, Singapore)
Li Ma (IBM Research, China)
Yutaka Matsuo (University of Tokyo, Japan)
Martin Memmel (DFKI, Germany)
Miriam Metzger (UCSB, USA)
Sudha Ram (University of Arizona, USA)
Shazia Sadiq (University of Queensland, Australia)
Kazutoshi Sumiya (University of Hyogo, Japan)
Wei Wang (University of New South Wales, Australia)
Martin Wolpers (Fraunhofer FIT, Germany)
Xiaochun Yang (Northeastern University, China)
Masatoshi Yoshikawa (Kyoto University, Japan)

You find more information about the workshop here.

Very nice end even better than the first version: The procrastination flowchart 2.0

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A long time ago since I blogged here the last time. A lot has happened - e.g., ALOE has become part of the European Project MACE (Metadata for Architectural Contents in Europe). Its aim is to create a common infrastructure for enriching and retrieving educational contents about architecture in Europe. In MACE, ALOE is used as a social layer - it allows users to tag, rate and comment on MACE resources, to create personal portfolios, and to contribute new resources.

Right now, MACE is presenting the mæve installation at the Venice Biennale. The aim is to connect the entries of the EveryVille student competition, and to put them into the larger context of MACE content and metadata. Visitors can place physical project cards on an interactive surface, exploring an organic network of projects, people and media.

Maeve installation at Architecture Biennale Venice from Maeve installation on Vimeo.

I think it looks absolutely amazing - Kudos to the developers: the Interface Design team of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. Great job! I’m looking very much forward to see the installation live this weekend!

The aim of the 2nd Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web (WICOW 2008) is to provide a forum for discussion about issues related to information credibility and its evaluation.

It will be held on October 30, 2008, in Napa Valley, California in conjunction with the 17th ACM CIKM.

You can find more information here.

Did I ever tell you that I’m a mathematician?

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Luckily, all the SPAM problems seem to have disappeared now (except for the SPAM that I’m creating myself here), and a new Wordpress version is now running. Time to share with you one of the funniest moments in the last weeks (where I’ve been to Edmonton at the Alberta University, but that’s a different story).

I was co-author of an extended abstract that a colleague of mine submitted some weeks ago. He submitted a .doc that was readable without any problems, even using Linux. It contained exactly as many characters as allowed. It was really simple stuff, nothing special. And here are the two reviews he got:

It is too short to judge and difficult to understand

your abstract is somehow a black box impossible to assess

I really LOVE these reviews. And maybe it was good not be accepted there…

I have the pleasure to be member of the program committee of the 2nd workshop 2nd on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL).

Topics of interests are (amongst others) Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) and Social Information Retrieval (SIR) techniques such as:

• Recommender systems
• Social collaborative searching, browsing and sharing of queries
• Social network analysis
• Game-theoretic approaches to select learning materials and learning partners in the long tail
• Social bookmarking and tagging, folksonomies
• Annotations, ratings and evaluations

You can contribute research papers, system demos, hands-on proposals and even “Pecha Kucha” talks. Sounds like some serious fun!

You can find more information about the workshop here!

I’m currently attending the educamp in Ilmenau. A lot of interesting sessions, especially yovisto really impressed me. If offers “academic video search” and already links to approximately 3000 videos, a lot of them from Germany, but also content from, e.g., MIT Lectures. What is really cool is the automatic indexing of videos using ocr, and the possibility to tag a certain point in time and to post these tags in other social bookmarking systems. Great work!

educamp sessions, source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cspannagel/2432559087

In the moment, I’m listening to a nice presentation about the digital profil of a fake identity (Rainer Buhl-Schied - good one). And of course I’ll attend the session with Stephan Downes, I hope they will set up a good connection…

I’m currently in Berlin attending the re:publica. The current session is quite boring, so I used the time to upload the slides of the presentation I gave yesterday. It’s called “Sagt wer? Metadaten im Web”. Slides are in German, but not that much text anyway.

| View | Upload your own

The presentation is about why metadata is important, how metadata can be generated, and about why we should embrace any kind of information that is available. At least when we have the choice what to use in which way. And of course I also talked about ALOE , also introducing our tag recommendation approach. More on this topic when I’m back from Berlin, and when the FP7 madness is over.

Just great. Luckily, I’m not concerned at all

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PS: I’m missing “Write some blog post” on the diagram…