Automated Knowledge Base Construction (AKBC 2013)

The advances in information extraction, machine learning, and natural language processing have led to the creation of large knowledge bases (KBs) from Web sources. Notable endeavors in this direction include Wikipedia-based approaches (such as YAGO, DBpedia, and Freebase), systems that extract from the entire Web (such as NELL and PROSPERA) or from specific domains (such as Rexa), and open information extraction approaches (TextRunner, PRISMATIC). This trend has led to new applications that make use of semantics. Most prominently, all major search engine providers (Yahoo!, Microsoft Bing, and Google) nowadays experiment with semantic tools. The Semantic Web, too, benefits from the new approaches.

With this year’s workshop, we would like to resume the positive experiences from two previous workshops: AKBC-2010 and AKBC-WEKEX-2012. The AKBC-2013 workshop will serve as a forum for researchers working in the area of automated knowledge harvesting from text. By having invited talks by leading researchers from industry, academia, and the government, and by focusing particularly on vision papers, we aim to provide a vivid forum of discussion about the field of automated knowledge base construction.

Organizers

• Fabian M. Suchanek, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany
• Sebastian Riedel, University College London, UK
• Sameer Singh, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
• Partha Pratim Talukdar, Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Worshop website: http://www.akbc.ws

The Sixteenth International Workshop On Data Warehousing and OLAP

Data Warehouse (DW) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) technologies are the core of current Decision Support Systems. Traditionally, a data warehouse has been a historical (and relatively static) repository of data collected from a wide variety of heterogeneous data sources by means of Extraction-Transformation-Loading (ETL) processes. The widespread deployment of both DWs and OLAP technologies is due to the intuitive representation of data provided to data analysts or managers in support of management decisions. Recently, the trend is that DWs become more and more dynamic, with near-real-time updates, and include more complex types of data.

DOLAP accepts submissions on data warehousing in a broad sense from both universities and industry. We are expanding topics to include work that bridges data warehousing and other large scale data processing platforms. This year, we encourage submissions from industry data warehouse technology developers describing technical details about their products as well as companies exploiting data warehousing technology describing case studies, experiences and technology limitations.

Organizers

• Il-Yeol Song, Drexel University, USA
• Ladjel Bellatreche , LIAS - ISAE-ENSMA - University of Poitiers, France
• Alfredo Cuzzocrea , ICAR-CNR and University of Calabria, Italy

Worshop website: http://dolap2013.ensma.fr/

The Sixth International Workshop on Exploiting Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval

There is an increasing amount of structure on the Web as a result of modern Web languages, micro-formats and linked data, user tagging and annotation, and emerging robust NLP tools. These meaningful, semantic, annotations hold the promise to significantly enhance information access, by enhancing the depth of analysis of today's systems. Currently, we have only started exploring the possibilities and only begin to understand how these valuable semantic cues can be put to fruitful use. To complicate matters, standard text search excels at shallow information needs expressed by short keyword queries, and here semantic annotation contributes very little, if anything. The main questions for the workshop are: How to make use of the currently emerging knowledge resources (such as DBpedia, Freebase) as underlying semantic model giving access to an unprecedented scope and detail of factual information? How to include annotations beyond the topical dimension (think of sentiment, reading level, prerequisite level, etc) that contain vital cues for matching the specific needs and profile of the searcher at hand?

Organizers

• Paul N. Bennett, Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA
• Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Google, Mount View, USA
• Jaap Kamps, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Jussi Karlgren, Gavagai Stockholm, Sweden

Worshop website: http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kamps/esair13/

Computational Scientometrics: Theory and Applications

As science advances, scientists around the world continue to produce large numbers of research articles, which provide the technological basis for worldwide collection, sharing, and dissemination of scientific discoveries. Understanding how research ideas emerge, evolve, or disappear as a topic, what is a good measure of quality of published works, what are the most promising areas of research, how authors connect and influence each other, who are the experts in a field, what works are similar, and who funds a particular research topic are some of the major foci of the rapidly emerging field of Scientometrics. Digital libraries and other databases that store research articles have become a medium for answering such questions. The recent developments in data mining, machine learning, NLP, and IR makes it possible to transform the way we analyze research publications, funded proposals, patents, etc., on a web-wide scale. The primary goal of the workshop is to promote both theoretical results and practical applications to better answer the above questions and address challenges that are faced by today’s researchers as well as well-known technological companies such as Microsoft and Google and publishers such as Elsevier. The workshop aims at bringing together researchers with diverse interdisciplinary backgrounds interested in mining large digital libraries and other relevant databases.

Organizers

• Cornelia Caragea, University of North Texas, USA
• C. Lee Giles, Pennsylvania State University, USA
• Lior Rokach, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
• Xiaozhong Liu, Indiana University Bloomington, USA

Worshop website: http://www.cse.unt.edu/~ccaragea/CIKM-WS-13.html

International Workshop on Mining unstructured big data using Natural Language Processing

Unstructured text data is heterogeneous and available in different formats, such as text document, scientific publication, web page, and customer comment. The availability of many big unstructured text datasets enables, while also challenges researchers to discover and explore valuable information/knowledge via different techniques. Mining semantics by using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methodologies is an important approach to uncover the “latent knowledge/semantic” of the unstructured text data.

In this workshop, we will aggregate different but highly related research communities, i.e., “NLP”, “Text Mining” and “IR” researchers, to investigate the possible opportunities and challenges in semantic mining problem.

Organizers

• Xiaozhong Liu, Indiana University Bloomington, USA
• Ying Ding, Indiana University Bloomington, USA
• Min Song, Yonsei University, South Korea
• Miao Chen, Indiana University Bloomington, USA

Worshop website: http://scholarwiki.indiana.edu/workshop/NLP/

The Fifth International Workshop on Cloud Data Management

The Fifth International workshop on Cloud Data Management (CloudDB 2013) will bring together researchers and practitioners in cloud computing and data-intensive system design, programming, parallel algorithms, data management, scientific applications, and information-based applications to maximize performance, minimize cost and improve the scale of their endeavours. Data management is one of the most important research areas in cloud computing. Even though increasing research interests are focused in this area, people still need a forum to exchange their ideas and results. This workshop aims to provide such a forum. This workshop also aims to reflect top research progress in the cloud data management area.

Organizers

• Xiaofeng Meng, Renmin University, China
• Fusheng Wang, Emory University, USA
• Feifei Li, University of Utah, USA
• Cong Yu, Google, USA

Worshop website: https://sites.google.com/site/clouddb2013/

Data-driven User Behavioral Modelling and Mining from Social Media

The massive amount of data being generated on social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, can be used to better understand people and predict their behavior. In this workshop, rather than continuing down the path of aggregating data across many users, we focus on the creation of deep models of individual users. In recent years, this has been active area of research and various analytic techniques have been applied to infer properties of users, including home location, gender, age, regional origin, ethnicity, political orientation, expertise, location preferences, enterprise preferences, and personality. Our workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas, such as user modelling, social media analysis, natural language processing, data mining, machine learning, privacy and security, to: 1) discuss the many remaining technical challenges, 2) the challenges of balancing expression with the need for privacy, and 3) develop an agenda for future research in this area.

Organizers

• Jalal Mahmud, IBM Research - Almaden, USA
• James Caverlee, Texas A&M University, USA
• Jeffrey Nichols, IBM Research - Almaden, USA
• John O' Donovan, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
• Michelle Zhou, IBM Research - Almaden, USA

Worshop website: https://sites.google.com/site/umsocial2013/

Politics, Elections and Data

What is the role of the internet in politics and during campaigns and what is the role of large amounts of user data in all of this?

In the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign the Democrats were again more successful than the Republicans in utilizing online media for mobilization, co-ordination, fundraising and micro- targeting. Social media and the Internet play a fundamental role in political campaigns. However, technical research in this area has been surprisingly limited and fragmented.

The goal of this workshop, held at CIKM 2013 in Burlingame/San Francisco, is to bring together researchers working at the intersection of social network analysis, computational social science and political science, to share and discuss their ideas in a common forum; and to inspire further developments in this growing, fascinating field of computational political science. The workshop will include Rayid Ghani, former Chief Scientist at Obama for America 2012 campaign, as a keynote speaker.

Organizers

• Ingmar Weber, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar
• Ana-Maria Popescu, Research consulting, USA
• Marco Pennacchiotti, Ebay Inc., USA

Worshop website: https://sites.google.com/site/plead2013/home

The Seventh International Workshop on Data and Text Mining in Biomedical Informatics

Biological researchers face the current challenge of making effective use of the enormous amount of electronic biomedical data in order to better understand and explain complex biological systems. The biomedical data repositories include data in a wide variety of forms, including bibliographic information from electronic medical journals, gene expression data from Microarray experiments, protein identification and quantification data from proteomics experiments, genomic sequences gathered by the Human Genome Project, and patient healthcare records. The ability to automatically and effectively extract, integrate, understand and make use of information embedded in such heterogeneous - structured and unstructured - data remains a challenging task.

We invite the submission of papers that propose ways to address the variety of aspects involved in meeting this challenge.

Organizers

• Dohen Lee, KAIST, South Korea
• Atul Butte, Stanford University, USA
• Min Song, Yonsei University, South Korea
• Hua Xu, University of Texas, USA

Worshop website: http://www.dtmbio.net/

Living Labs for Information Retrieval Evaluation

Evaluation is a central aspect of information retrieval (IR) research. In the past few years, a new evaluation methodology known as living labs has been proposed as a way for researchers to be able to perform in-situ evaluation. The basic idea of living labs for IR is that rather than individual research groups independently developing experimental search infrastructures and gathering their own groups of test searchers for IR evaluations, a central and shared experimental environment is developed to facilitate the sharing of resources. Living labs would offer huge benefits to the community, such as: availability of, potentially larger, cohorts of real users and their behaviours, e.g. querying behaviours, for experiment purposes; cross-comparability across research centres; and greater knowledge transfer between industry and academia, when industry partners are involved. The need for this methodology is further amplified by the increased reliance of IR approaches on proprietary data; living labs are a way to bridge the data divide between academia and industry. Progress towards realising actual living labs has nevertheless been limited. There are many challenges to be overcome before the benefits associated with living labs for IR can be realised, including challenges associated with living labs architecture and design, hosting, maintenance, security, privacy, participant recruiting, and scenarios and tasks for use development. In this workshop we seek to bring together for the first time people interested in progressing the living labs for IR evaluation methodology.

Organizers

• Krisztian Balog, University of Stavanger, Norway
• David Elsweiler, University of Regensburg, Germany
• Evangelos Kanoulas, Google, Switzerland
• Liadh Kelly, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Mark Smucker, University of Waterloo, Canada

Worshop website: http://ll2013.dcu.ie/

The First Workshop on User Engagement Optimization

Online user engagement plays a central role in the business success of many industry companies that own or operate Web sites, apps, and other online systems, including major Web search engines, Web portals, social networking websites, e-commerce systems, and numerous mobile/Web app owners. The key idea of online engagement optimization is to discover and leverage collected knowledge about the behavioral patterns of online engagement and provide features, functionality and experiences accordingly to attract users’ involvement, facilitate their interaction and enhance the long-term satisfaction. This workshop aims to connect academic researchers and industrial practitioners who are working on or interested in online engagement optimization.

Organizers

• Liangjie Hong, Yahoo! Labs, USA
• Shuang-Hong Yang, Twitter Inc., USA

Worshop website: http://www.ueo-workshop.com/

The Sixth Workshop for Ph.D. Students at CIKM 2013

The goal of the PIKM workshop is two-fold: First, we want to give doctoral students an opportunity to present their work in an early state to a global audience. This allows the students to receive feedback from reviewers, from fellow students and from the general CIKM audience. Second, we believe that the database research community, too, benefits from such a workshop: PhD theses are the grassroots of research. They point out new research avenues and provide fresh viewpoints from the researchers of tomorrow.

Organizers

• Fabian M. Suchanek, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany
• Anisoara Nica, SAP, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Worshop website: http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/PIKM2013/

International Workshop on Data management \& Analytics for healthcaRE

This workshop is focused on identifying challenges to be overcome for effectively delivering efficient healthcare and to the masses. Specifically, we will provide a forum to discuss research directions, share experience and insights from both academia and industry. The anticipated outcome of the workshop is an assessment of the state of the art in the area, as well as identification of critical next steps to pursue in this topic.

Organizers

• Ullas Nambiar, EMC India Center of Excellence, Bangalore, India
• Niranjan Thirumale, EMC India Center of Excellence, Bangalore, India

Worshop website: https://sites.google.com/site/ubnambiar/dare2013/

The Fouth International Workshop on Web-scale Knowledge Representation Retrieval and Reasoning

The World Wide Web has become the carrier for the largest human knowledge repository in history. As its knowledge bases are growing towards a practically 'infinite' volume, Web- scale Knowledge Representation, Retrieval, and Reasoning (Web-KR) is becoming a real issue and an urgent task. Although the Web community has developed a number of knowledge representation languages and reasoning methods, when the volume goes Web-scale, existing approaches meet many challenging problems, such as scalability, inconsistency, uncertainty and dynamics. Hence, a unified approach to Web-KR needs to be developed.This workshop aims to bringing together researchers from Web research, Artificial Intelligence (AI), high performance computing, cognitive science, knowledge management, and machine learning to discuss all issues of Web-KR in a synergistic setting. The main themes for Web-KR 2013 are construction of Web-scale knowledge bases, semantic search and reasoning (both deductive an inductive) over Web-scale knowledge bases.

Organizers

• Yi Zeng, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
• Spyros Kotoulas, IBM Ireland Research Lab, Dublin, Ireland
• Zhisheng Huang, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Worshop website: http://www.linked-neuron-data.org/workshops/Web-KR-2013/