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      Special Track on: INFORMATION ACCESS AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS
             http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/SAC2003/

          18th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2003)
              March 9-12, 2003, Melbourne, Florida, USA
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Over the past seventeen years, the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
(SAC) has become a primary forum for applied computer scientists and
application developers from around the world to interact and present
their work. SAC 2003 is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on
Applied Computing (SIGAPP): its proceedings are published by ACM in
both printed form and CD-ROM; they are also available on the web
through ACM's Digital Library. Visit the SAC 2003 home page for
further information: http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2003/


SPECIAL TRACK ON INFORMATION ACCESS AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS (SAC-IARS)

Nowadays, one of the most important and challenging problems in
computer science is the definition of effective technologies, which
support access to information. With the expansion of the Internet
effective tools for finding relevant information are urgently
needed. This special track will be concerned with theory and, in
particular, applications of novel approaches to information access and
retrieval. The track has been successfully running within SAC since
2002.

The general area of information access and retrieval aims at
modelling, designing and implementing systems able to provide fast and
effective content-based access to a large amount of
information. Information can be of any kind: textual, visual, or
auditory. The aim of such systems is to estimate the relevance of
documents to a user's information need. This is a very hard and
complex task, since it is pervaded with subjectivity, vagueness and
uncertainty. We think that a promising direction to improve
information access and retrieval effectiveness is to model the
uncertainty and vagueness intrinsic in the process, and to make
systems more adaptive, i.e. able to "learn" and to adapt to the
changing users' concept of relevance. In this track we solicit papers
that present theory, applications, and best practice of these systems.


Major topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

- models of information access and retrieval
- applications of advanced information access and retrieval systems
- multimedia and multimodal information access and retrieval
- content-based information filtering
- collaborative filtering
- search engines
- distributed information access and retrieval
- information and data fusion
- interfaces for information access
- user modelling
- trials and best practice in information access and retrieval


Track Program Chairs:

- Fabio Crestani, Department of Computer and Information Sciences,
  University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, UK,
  [log in to unmask]

- Gabriella Pasi, Institute for Multimedia Technologies, National
  Council of Research (ITIM-CNR), Milano, Italy
  [log in to unmask]


Guidelines for Submission

Original papers from the above-mentioned or other related areas will
be considered.  This includes three categories of submissions: 1)
original and unpublished research; 2) reports of innovative computing
applications in the arts, sciences, engineering, business, government,
education and industry; and 3) reports of successful technology
transfer to new problem domains. Each submitted paper will be fully
refereed and undergo a blind review process by at least three
referees. The accepted papers in all categories will be published in
the ACM SAC 2003 proceedings.


Submission guidelines must be strictly followed:

Submit your paper electronically in either PDF or PS format to the
e-mail addresses of the Track Program Chairs (with subject
SAC03). Submissions should be printable on a standard printer on
common paper formats, such as US letter and A4.

The author(s) name(s) and address(es) must not appear in the body of
the paper, and self-reference should be in the third person. This is
to facilitate blind review. The body of the paper should not exceed
5,000 words (approximately 15 pages, double-spaced).  Authors should
also attach to the message a separate cover sheet, showing the title
of the paper, the author(s) name(s) and affiliation(s), and the
contact address (including e-mail, telephone, and fax).

For more information see http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/SAC2003/


Important dates:

September 6, 2002       Paper Submission
October 18,  2002       Author Notification
November 8,  2002       Camera-Ready Copy
March 9-12,  2003       SAC 2003 takes place