CALL FOR PAPERS

Web Information-Seeking and Interaction (WISI)

A workshop at SIGIR 2007 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Friday July 27, 2007

http://research.microsoft.com/~ryenw/wisi

Submission deadline: May 16
Notification of acceptance: June 8
Camera-ready copy due: June 22

OBJECTIVES
The World Wide Web has provided access to a diverse range of information
sources and systems. People engaging with this rich network of
information may need to interact with different technologies,
interfaces, and information providers in the course of a single search
task. These systems may offer different interaction affordances and
require users to adapt their information-seeking strategies. Not only is
this challenging for users, but it also presents challenges for the
designers of interactive systems, who need to make their own system
useful and usable to broad user groups.  The popularity of Web browsing
and Web search engines has given rise to distinct forms of
information-seeking behaviour, and new interaction styles, but we do not
yet fully understand these or their implications for the development of
new systems.

Web information seeking and interaction (i.e., the interaction of users
with Web-based content and applications during information-seeking
activities) is a topic that unites many strands of academic and
commercial research, from studies of information-seeking behaviour to
the design and construction of large-scale interactive systems.
Designing components to support this interaction (and evaluating these
components) is particularly challenging given the scale of the Web, the
diversity of the user population, the diversity in tasks being
undertaken, and the dynamic nature of the information.

This workshop is intended to act as a focal point for researchers and
practitioners whose work is related to web information seeking and
interaction, to enable them to share experiences and collaborate.

We aim to
* bring together perspectives from different areas: as well as
researchers in the information retrieval field, we encourage submissions
from developers of Web sites and services, human-computer interaction
researchers, and the information seeking community
* connect industrial and academic researchers and practitioners who
provide online services, both commercial and non-commercial
* initiate possible collaborations between participants with
complementary interests, from the different communities.


WORKSHOP THEMES
Themes include, but are not limited to:

* models or studies of information-seeking behaviour on the Web
* user studies of interaction with Web search engines (either general or
domain/media specific engines)
* models or studies of query formulation, relevance assessment,
browsing, or other factors that affect interaction with Web information
* user characteristics and their effect on Web searching or browsing
behaviour
* personal information management and the Web
* evaluation methodologies for information seeking and interaction studies
* new paradigms for Web information seeking
* social search behaviour on the Web
* novel log analyses of Web search behaviour
* novel interactive Web services deriving from studies of human behaviour

The workshop will open with a panel entitled: “Challenges and
Opportunities in Supporting Web Search Interaction” that includes an
expert in: a) information seeking, b) user interfaces for search, and c)
large-scale Web search interface development and/or evaluation. The aim
of the panel is to provide a broad overview of the issues in this area.
We hope to provide an opportunity for all attendees to hear perspectives
with which they may not be familiar.

SUBMISSION
The one day workshop will be a mixture of short paper presentations,
discussion and activities.

Papers may be up to 4 pages long in the SIGIR conference format
http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html (Option 2)
and should be submitted as PDF files through the workshop website at
http://research.microsoft.com/~ryenw/wisi/submit.html
by May 16 2007 (midnight US Pacific time).

Papers may describe completed work, work in progress, or the author's
position on one or more of the workshop themes.

A subset of the accepted papers will be selected for oral presentation
at the workshop, and others will be selected as background papers for
the proceedings.  The main selection criteria are quality, and
appropriateness to the workshop themes. We will aim to ensure that
papers selected for oral presentation have topics that will provide a
good focus for the later discussions (the main activity of the
workshop), while covering a broad range of areas overall.


Notification of acceptance: June 8

Camera-ready copy due: June 22

ORGANIZERS

Kerry Rodden (Google)
Ian Ruthven (University of Strathclyde)
Ryen White (Microsoft Research)

PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
Anne Aula, Google
Peter Bailey, Synop
Pia Borlund, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark
Luanne Freund, University of Toronto, Canada
Marti Hearst, UC Berkeley, US
David Hendry, University of Washington, US
Jim Jansen, Penn State, US
Melanie Kellar, Dalhousie University, Canada
Diane Kelly, University of North Carolina, US
Jimmy Lin, University of Maryland
Xuehua Shen, UIUC, US
Amanda Spink, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Jaime Teevan, Microsoft Research
Anastasios Tombros, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
Pertti Vakkari, University of Tampere, Finland
Ross Wilkinson, CSIRO, Australia

-- 
Ian Ruthven
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow G1 1XH
Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +44 141 548 3098
Fax: +44 141 548 4523
http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/~ir