Apologies for the widespread distribution.

1st Workshop on Large-Scale Distributed Systems for Information Retrieval
(LSDS-IR)
 July 27, 2007 - to be held at ACM SIGIR 2007, Amsterdam

URL: http://www.tel.fer.hr/lsds-ir/


1- Motivation:
The Web is growing and the demand for fast, accurate search grows
accordingly. To fulfill such a demand, information retrieval (IR) systems
have to be capable of accommodating growth as well as processing a large
number of queries. As the volume of data and the number of users are not
trivial, there is a need for investigation on systems that are truly able to
perform well under such conditions.   

2- Scope:
The main goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers interested
in the design and implementation of IR systems to discuss ongoing work in
the area along with future directions. In particular, it will focus on
scalability and efficiency issues in large-scale distributed systems for IR.
Equally interesting to this venue are novel applications for large-scale
distributed IR architectures. Applications such as P2P Search and
Community-based P2P file sharing leverage the resources contributed by the
participant peers, whereas in Grid systems applications can potentially use
the large amount of processing capacity available to provide more
sophisticated services. Thus, new paradigms or ways of leveraging all the
resources of large-scale systems are of high interest to this venue.

In more detail, we expect submissions on the following topics:

  - Efficiency and scalability in distributed IR
  - Novel applications for distributed IR architectures
  - P2P IR
  - Retrieval models for distributed IR
  - Heterogeneous distributed data integration and organization
  - Resource selection and query routing
  - Distributed ranking
  - Distributed crawling
  - Multimedia retrieval for distributed IR
  - Indexing and retrieval of dynamic information sources
  - Grid IR


3- Submission:
This venue accepts submissions of position papers (up to 5 pages) and
research papers (up to 8 pages). Submissions must be in English, and must
contain original work. All papers, independent of being a position or a
research paper, must be able to generate discussion during the workshop, and
consequently the PC will favor original and controversial ideas. The format
is ACM (option 2 in http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html), and
submission instructions will be posted on the workshop site soon. 

4- Workshop format:
The papers accepted for presentation will be assigned a 25 minute slot,
where 20 minutes is allocated for presentation and 5 minutes for questions.
In the end of each session, there will be a 15 minute panel with the
presenters of the session.

5- Important dates:
Submission deadline: June 1, 2007
Acceptance notification: June 29, 2007
Camera-ready submission: July 5, 2007


6- Organization:

Main organizers:
Flavio Junqueira, Vassilis Plachouras (Yahoo! Research Barcelona)
Fabrizio Silvestri (ISTI-CNR)
Ivana Podnar (University of Zagreb)


Program committee:

Karl Aberer, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne 
Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo! Research 
Fidel Cacheda, University of A Coruña 
Abdur Chowdhury, Illinois Institute of Technology 
Norbert Fuhr, University of Duisburg-Essen 
Ronny Lempel, IBM Research Haifa 
Jie Lu, Carnegie Mellon University 
Wolfgang Nejdl, L3S/University of Hannover 
Gregory Newby, University of Alaska 
Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow 
Diego Puppin, Italian National Research Center 
Thomas Risse, L3S/University of Hannover 
Luo Si, Purdue University 
Umberto Straccia, Italian National Research Center 
Christos Tryfonopoulos, Max Planck Institute 
Michalis Vazirgiannis, Athens University of Economics and Business 
Gerhard Weikum, Max Planck Institute 
Pavel Zezula, Masaryk University 
Justin Zobel, RMIT University