On behalf of the organizing committee, it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 22nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2013) in San Francisco!

CIKM is a premier ACM conference in the areas of information retrieval, knowledge management and databases. Since 1992, it has successfully brought together leading researchers and developers from the three communities. The purpose of the conference is to identify challenging problems facing the development of future knowledge and information systems, and to shape future research directions through the publication of high quality applied and theoretical research findings. In CIKM 2013, we continue the tradition of promoting collaboration among multiple areas and providing a leading forum in which experts from academia, industry, and government gather to exchange ideas, research results, and technical developments in multidisciplinary research areas.

As one of the world’s most recognized conferences in the field, this year CIKM received 848 valid full paper submissions, 233 poster submissions, and 57 demonstration submissions. Among them, we accepted 143 full papers (16.86% acceptance rate), 107 short papers, 81 posters and 21 demos. In addition to regular research tracks, CIKM 2013 features 4 keynote speakers, a panel on Big Data, dedicated Industry events featuring 10 leading industrial practitioners, 10 tutorials from prestigious researchers and 14 workshops on cutting-edge areas of research. This is a great demonstration of the lively research areas that contribute to the CIKM area. We are proud of our final program and gratefully thank all authors, invited speakers and organizers who chose to contribute their time and research to CIKM 2013.

We are honored to present four distinguished keynote speakers to attendees: Ronald Fagin, Lee Giles, Carlos Guestrin, and Alon Halevy. Their valuable, insightful and interdisciplinary talks will guide us to a better understanding of the field.

Putting together the CIKM 2013 program was a team effort. A significant part of the program is due to the technical leadership of our four program committee chairs, Wolfgang Nejdl, Jian Pei, Rajeev Rastogi, and Fabrizio Silvestri, and the strength of 427 program committee members and 95 senior program committee members who worked very hard in reviewing papers and providing feedback for authors. We would like to thank Jiawei Han who worked with other 5 panelists on the panel “Channeling the Deluge: Research Challenges for Big Data and Information Systems”. We are also grateful to Brian Johnson and Baojun Qiu for putting together an excellent industry program by inviting 10 influential technical leaders to present the state of the art in industrial research and development, Jianfeng Gao and Xuedong Huang who solicited a great range of tutorials, Jianshu Weng and Esteban Zimanyi who organized the workshop program, Yuanyuan Tian who managed 83 committee members and ran a dedicated poster program independently, as well as Luna Dong and Shuming Shi who managed 24 committee members in the demonstration track and introduced the demo sessions into the program. Finally, we thank Luo Si who monitored and managed the process of editing the proceedings to meet a very tight production schedule.

Our local team has superbly supported the conference. We gratefully thank our sponsorship chairs Amol Ghoting and Rong Yan who actively brought in industrial sponsorships and allowed us to award grants to student attendees, Yuan Tian who was a great publicity chair and also managed our conference website as well as social media, our registration chair Mu Qiao and treasurer Ek Park who worked hard to set up the registration site and monitor the registration process and financial status, our local arrangement chairs Jiang Bian and Yi Fang who have made a huge effort into every aspect of the conference. Lastly, we especially thank the student volunteer team led by Yi Fang for their tremendous time to help run the conference smoothly.

We would like to highly express our appreciation to our generous corporate supporters, Microsoft Research, eBay, LinkedIn, IBM Research, Facebook, Yahoo! Labs, Bright, FXPAL, Google, Yandex and A9. We also thank the sponsoring ACM SIGIR and SIGWEB, and their respective chairs, Charles Clarke (current chair of SIGIR), James Allan (ex-chair of SIGIR), Simon Harper (SIGWEB) for their advice and support. Our special thanks go to SIGIR, SIGWEB, and Facebook for sponsoring the student travel award, and LinkedIn for organizing the company tour for student attendees.

Finally, we would like to thank the CIKM Steering Committee led by David Grossman for their vote of confidence in us, and our CIKM liaison Ek Park who guided us along this long path since two years ago. It is a great honor and pleasure to accept the responsibilities and challenges of general chairs. We sincerely hope that you will find this year’s program interesting and that it will provide you with a valuable opportunity to share ideas with other pioneering researchers around the world. Enjoy the CIKM 2013 conference and your stay in the San Francisco Bay Area!

Qi He CIKM 2013 General Co-Chair. LinkedIn, Relevance Science, Mountain View, CA, USA

Arun Iyengar CIKM 2013 General Co-Chair. IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA