My #WWW2009 Reading List

The papers are out for WWW2009 (and have been for a bit), but I’ve only just gotten a chance to start looking at them. First of all, kudos to the ePrints people for improving the presentation of conference proceedings. This is a lot easier than having to do a Google Scholar search for each paper and hoping I find something, like I have to do with some conferences.

WWW2009 Madrid

There are a lot of very interesting ones, and here are a few that bubbled to the top of my reading list:

Data Mining Track

• A Class-Feature-Centroid Classifier for Text Categorization
• Large Scale Multi-Label Classification via MetaLabeler
• Learning Consensus Opinion: Mining Data from a Labeling Game
• Matchbox: Large Scale Online Bayesian Recommendations

Semantic/Data Web

• Extracting Key Terms From Noisy and Multi-theme Documents
• Triplify: Light-Weight Linked Data Publication from Relational Databases

Social Networks and Web 2.0

• Personalized Recommendation on Dynamic Content Using Predictive Bilinear Models
• Ranking and Classifying Attractiveness of Photos in Folksonomies
• Tagommenders: Connecting Users to Items through Tags

SIGKDD Workshop on Large Scale Recommender Systems

The second workshop on large scale recommender systems will be at SIGKDD in Las Vegas this year.  One of the main topics is the Netflix competition and Jim Bennett of Netflix is one of the co-chairs, so there should be some interesting stuff in that area.  Plus all the other cool stuff going on with recommender systems (yes, there is other work being done on them!).  Another of the co-chairs is Daniel Lemire, whose blog never disappoints.

The paper deadline for the workshop is May 30th.

NESCAI 2008

This conference looks like it might be fun if you’re a student working on some area of AI/machine learning and going to a university in the Northeastern US. NESCAI is the North East Student Colloquium on Artificial Intelligence and will be held at Cornell May 2-4, 2008. The deadline for papers is March 7, 2008, so the date is fast approaching. The full CFP is below the fold.

ACL 2008 Student Workshop CFP

The Call for Papers (CFP) is out for the Student Workshop at next year’s ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) conference.  I’ve been playing around with a couple of side ideas, it would be nice to have something to submit to this.  We’ll see.  Full CFP is below the jump.

ACL 2008 Call for Papers

Well, the Call for Papers is out for ACL 2008 (Association for Computatonal Linguistics), which will be held in the city of my birth. Columbus, Ohio is such a short drive, it’d be a shame if I didn’t attend, even if I’m probably not submitting anything. The trick is getting someone else to pay for it!

Conference dates: 15-20 June 2008

Deadline for full papers: 10 January 2008
Deadline for short papers: 14 March 2008

The full Call for Papers is below the jump.

Pecha Kucha

I came across this article in Wired today about a new format for presentations called Pecha Kucha, which comes from the Japanese word for chit-chat. It was invented by a foreign architect duo Mark Dytham (British) and Astrid Klein (Italian) living in Japan who saw a need for a way to showcase their work that blossomed quickly into a international fad. Four years after its inception, there are Pecha Kucha nights in over 80 cities worldwide.

The idea is simple: 20 slides. 20 seconds each. That’s 400 seconds = 6 minutes 40 seconds. The result is a sort of performance art that allows people to network and showcase their work. Pecha Kucha seems to be bleeding over into the mainstream business world based on a couple of quick YouTube searches. I think it should bleed over into the scientific. I see two other places that would benefit greatly from it:

CFP Wiki

Just the other day I was discussing upcoming conferences with my friend Eric.  We were lamenting the choice of location for the 2008 ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) conference in Columbus, OH — my hometown.  At least I can stay with family (assuming I even go).  The conference I really want to go to (and actually have a chance of going to) is ICML (International Conference on Machine Learning) in Helsinki, Finland.  Eric said he’d rather to go to Spain, which sparked a very brief and unsuccessful search for conferences dealing with computational linguistics in Spain.

Today I came across a post on the comp.ai.nat-lang newsgroup pointing to a new wiki for calls for papers.  How timely!  And very nice.  A brief search on WikiCFP revealed that Eric’s best chances are for the EURALEX conference in Barcelona, which deals with dictionaries (including software approaches).  Not that he’s doing any work with dictionaries.   I may be, though, with my new project.  I’d much rather go to Helsinki, though, and ICML would do my career a lot of good.

CICLing 2008: CFP

The 9th annual Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics is calling for papers. The conference will be held in Haifa, Israel from February 17-23, 2008. Two of the keynote speakers were professors of mine last semester. Alon Lavie works on machine translation (including for low-resource languages) and machine translation evaluation. Kemal Oflazer was a visiting professor here at CMU last semester and advised me for a lab project on Old English morphology. He’s one of the leading proponents of finite state technology for morphological analysis and has done a lot of work with Turkish, which has a very rich morphology.

Submission Deadline: October 15, 2007.

The full CFP is given below: