------------------------------------------------------------------------ Call for Participation Due to multiple requests there is an E X T E N D E D D E A D L I N E: April 15th, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Workshop on "Machine Learning for Information Filtering" at IJCAI 99 August 1st, 1999 Stockholm, Sweden http://www-ai.cs.uni-dortmund.de/EVENTS/IJCAI99-MLIF The enormous growth of on-line information and electronic commerce has brought about a comparable growth in research on methods for automatically organizing and personalizing information. The "information filtering" task has simultaneously emerged as an active research topic in several disciplines, including information retrieval, human computer interaction, natural language processing, and machine learning. The information filtering task manifests itself in many theoretically challenging and commercially important applications, such as electronic commerce and marketing, search engines, information push applications, browsing assistants, and adaptive Web sites. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers working on information filtering from many subfields of AI, while emphasizing the machine learning techniques and algorithms many of these subfields share. These techniques include * text classification methods (probabilistic methods, support vector machines, first order methods, use of unlabeled data, etc.) * collaborative filtering methods (use of complex user and object profiles (e.g. citation structure), novel clustering models and methods, etc.) * other methods for learning user preferences (learning orderings, etc.) * combinations of approaches and multi-strategy learning * representational issues (knowledge representation, NLP techniques, representing interest, representing information objects, feature selection, term weighting, data transformation, latent semantic indexing, etc.) * clustering methods (similarity measures, mixture models, etc.) * scalability issues * formal models and theory * handling different media (text, images, sound, etc.) * evaluation techniques Besides these topics, the workshop covers all theoretical and methodological issues concerning information filtering. Submissions describing innovative applications of information filtering are also encouraged. By bringing together industrial representatives with researchers, the workshop will * show how problems from industry present new research issues. * identify ways in which research results may be put in more widespread practice in an industrial setting. INVITED SPEAKERS * Prof. Oren Etzioni (Univ. of. Washington) * Jan Pedersen (Director, Advanced Technology, InfoSeek Corp.) TIMETABLE April 15, 1999 Submission deadline May 3, 1999 Notification of acceptance May 24, 1999 Camera-ready copy due August 1, 1999 Workshop ORGANIZATION The workshop will be one full day, including invited talks, paper presentations, poster presentations, and numerous opportunities for discussion. Depending on submissions, there will be joint sessions with the workshop "Text Mining: Foundations, Techniques and Applications" on topics of common interest. Participation in the workshop is limited according to IJCAI regulations. All workshop participants have to register for the IJCAI conference. The working notes of the workshop will be published online. SUBMISSION PROCEDURE Those interested in making a presentation should submit a full paper electronically either as a Postscript or PDF to joachims@ls8.cs.uni-dortmund.de. The first page of submitted papers should include: title, author names and affiliations, a brief abstract. It should also name a designated contact person with his or her postal address, electronic mail address, telephone and fax number. Submissions should not exceed 8 pages (including the title page) according to the IJCAI formatting instructions and should be printable on 8.5" x 11" or A4 paper. Those interested in participating in the workshop, but not submitting a paper, should submit a one-page abstract of their research interests in learning methods for information filtering. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Thorsten Joachims (Chair) Andrew McCallum Universitaet Dortmund Just Research FB Informatik, LS8 4616 Henry Street Baroper Str. 301 Pittsburgh, PA 15213 44221 Dortmund, Germany Phone: (412) 683-9132 Phone: +49 231 755 5102 FAX: (412) 683-4175 FAX: +49 231 755 5105 Email: mccallum@justresearch.com joachims@ls8.cs.uni-dortmund.de Mehran Sahami Lyle Ungar Epiphany, Inc. University of Pennsylvania 2300 Geng Road Dept of Comp. and Info. Sci. Palo Alto, CA 94303 200 S. 33rd St. Phone: (650) 496-2399 Philadelphia, PA 19104-6389 FAX: (650) 496-2431 Phone: (215) 898-7449 Email: sahami@epiphany.com FAX: (215) 898-0587 Email: ungar@cis.upenn.edu FURTHER INFORMATION http://www-ai.cs.uni-dortmund.de/EVENTS/IJCAI99-MLIF