CFP: SeRSy 2012 - Semantic Technologies meet Recommender Systems & Big Data

[Tommaso Di Noia]

Apologies for possible multiple posts

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CALL FOR PAPERS
============================
International Workshop on
Semantic Technologies meet Recommender Systems & Big Data - SeRSy 2012
in conjunction with ISWC 2012, Boston, USA, November 11-15, 2012

http://sisinflab.poliba.it/sersy2012/


IMPORTANT DATES
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Submission for workshop papers: Jul 31
Notification of acceptance: Aug 21
Camera-ready versions: Sep 10


MOTIVATION
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People generally need more and more advanced tools that go beyond those 
implementing the canonical search paradigm for seeking relevant 
information. A new search paradigm is emerging, where the user 
perspective is completely reversed: from finding to being found. 
Recommender Systems may help to support this new perspective, because 
they have the effect of pushing relevant objects, selected from a large 
space of possible options, to potentially interested users. To achieve 
this result, recommendation techniques generally rely on data referring 
to three kinds of objects: users, items and their relations.

Recent developments of the Semantic Web community offer novel strategies 
to represent data about users, items and their relations that might 
improve the current state of the art of recommender systems, in order to 
move towards a new generation of recommender systems which fully 
understand the items they deal with.

More and more semantic data are published following the Linked Data 
principles, that enable to set up links between objects in different 
data sources, by connecting information in a single global data space: 
the Web of Data. Today, Web of Data includes different types of 
knowledge represented in a homogeneous form: sedimentary one 
(encyclopedic, cultural, linguistic, common-sense) and real-time one 
(news, data streams, ...). This data might be useful to interlink 
diverse information about users, items, and their relations and 
implement reasoning mechanisms that can support and improve the 
recommendation process.

The challenge is to investigate whether and how this large amount of 
wide-coverage and linked semantic knowledge can be automatically 
introduced into systems that perform tasks requiring human-level 
intelligence.  Examples of such tasks include understanding a health 
problem in order to make a medical decision,
or simply deciding which laptop to buy. Recommender systems support 
users exactly in those complex tasks.

The primary goal of the workshop is to showcase cutting edge research on 
the intersection of Semantic Technologies and Recommender Systems, by 
taking the best of the two worlds. This combination may provide the 
Semantic Web community with important real-world scenarios where its 
potential can be effectively exploited into systems performing complex 
tasks.



TOPICS
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Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Recommendation approaches using Semantic technologies
- Linked Data for Recommender Systems
- Ontology-based recommendation algorithms
- Merging and ranking recommendations
- Social recommender systems
- Reasoning with Big Data

Data Acquisition
- Discovery of relevant Linked Data sources for recommendation algorithms
- Tracking provenance, evaluating reliability, quality and 
trustworthiness of Linked Data
- Linking, aggregating, intertwining and mining Linked Data for 
recommender systems
- Integrity and privacy issues

New Reference Architectures for Recommender Systems
- Linked Data in new Recommender Systems architectures
- Efficiency, performance and scalability issues
- Distributed architectures

Innovative applications
- Semantic technologies for Cross-lingual and cross-domain recommender 
systems
- Mining user data streams
- Semantic technologies for improving transparency and explanations

Evaluation methodologies and approaches
- Big datasets for the evaluation
- Evaluation methodologies for real time personalization in big datasets
- Semantic technologies for improving novelty, diversity and serendipity




SUBMISSION
-----------------------
We welcome work at all stages of development: papers can describe 
applied systems, empirical results or theoretically grounded positions.

Accepted papers will be published as CEUR workshop proceedings 
(http://ceur-ws.org).
Based on the quality of accepted papers we are planning to schedule a 
special issue of a top-level journal in 2013.

* Full papers (10-12 pages)
* Short papers (4-6 pages)
* Demos (2-4 pages for description)

Papers should be formatted according to the general ISWC2012 submission 
guidelines. Accepted format is PDF.

Please submit your paper via EasyChair at the following URL:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sersy2012

You need to open a personal account upon the first login, if you do not 
have one.


ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
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Marco de Gemmis - University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
Tommaso Di Noia - Politecnico of Bari, Italy
Pasquale Lops - University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy
Thomas Lukasiewicz - University of Oxford, UK
Giovanni Semeraro - University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy


PROGRAM COMMITTEE
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Fabien Abel (L3S Research Centre - Germany)
Claudio Bartolini (HP Labs @ Palo Alto - USA)
Marco Brambilla (Politecnico di Milano - Italy)
Andrea Calì (Birkbeck, University of London - UK)
Ivan Cantador (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid - Spain)
Pablo Castells (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid - Spain)
Federica Cena (University of Turin - Italy)
Bettina Fazzinga (Università  della Calabria - Italy)
Tim Furche (Oxford University Computing Laboratories - UK)
Nicola Henze (Leibniz Universitä Hannover - Germany)
Leo Iaquinta (Univ.di Milano Bicocca - Italy)
Roberto Mirizzi (Politecnico of Bari - Italy)
Enrico Motta (Open University in Milton Keynes - UK)
Cataldo Musto (Università  di Bari "Aldo Moro" - Italy)
Fedelucio Narducci (Univ.di Milano Bicocca - Italy)
Vito Claudio Ostuni (Politecnico of Bari - Italy)
Alexandre Passant (seevl.net - Ireland)
Gerardo I. Simari (University of Oxford - UK)
Markus Zanker (Alpen–Adria–Universitä Klagenfurt - Austria)


CONTACT
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e-mail: sersy2012 at gmail.com
Web page: http://sisinflab.poliba.it/sersy2012/
twitter: @sersy2012
linkedin: http://tinyurl.com/sersy2012