Dear Colleagues
We welcome your contributions to the WWW2011 DiversiWeb Workshop. Kindly
see below for details.
Best Regards
--
Devika Madalli, DRTC/ISIBC
Co-Chair, DiversiWeb 2011
******** Apologies for multiple postings ***********
Please forward to interested parties and relevant listservs
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Call for Papers for DiversiWeb 2011
First International Workshop on Knowledge Diversity on the Web
Workshop at WWW 2011, Hyderabad, India, March 28 or 29 (TBD), 2011
Supported by the EU FP7 projects RENDER and Living Knowledge
== Organization committee ==
* Elena Simperl, AIFB, KIT, Germany
* Devika P. Madalli, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, India *
Denny Vrandecic, AIFB, KIT, Germany
* Enrique Alfonseca, Google Zurich, Switzerland
Website:
=========
http://render-project.eu/diversiweb-2011/
Almost 20 years after its introduction, the Web provides a platform for
the publication, use and exchange of information, at planetary scale, on
virtually every topic, and representing an amazing diversity of opinions,
viewpoints, mindsets and backgrounds. The success of the Web can be
attributed to several factors, most notably to its principled scalable
design, but also to a number of subsequent ICT developments such as smart
user-generated content, mobile devices, and most recently cloud computing.
The first two of these have dramatically lowered the last barriers of
entry when it comes to producing and consuming information online, leading
to an unprecedented growth and mass collaboration. They are responsible
for hundreds of millions of users all over the globe creating high-quality
encyclopedias, publishing Terabytes of multimedia content, contributing to
world-class software, and lively taking part in defining the agenda of
many aspects of our society by raising their voices, and publicly
expressing and sharing their ideas, viewpoints, and resources.
The other side of the coin in this unique success story is, nevertheless,
the great challenges associated with managing the sheer amounts of
information continuously being published online, whilst allowing for
purposeful use, and leveraging the diversity inherently unfolding through
global-scale collaboration. In this context, diversity includes different
opinions, sentiments, preferences, or worldviews that are reflected in the
way information is expressed on the Web. These challenges are still to be
solved at many levels, from the infrastructure to store and access the
information, through the methods and techniques to make sense out of it,
to the paradigms underlying the processes of Web-based information
provision and consumption.
As an example, when searching for blog posts, state-of-the-art technology
– be that popularity-based algorithms, recommendation engines or
collaborative filters – tends to return either the most popular posts, or
those which correspond with a personal profile and therefore with the
known opinions and tastes of the reader. Alternative points of view, and
new unexpected content, are not taken into account as they are not highly
ranked, and posts expressing different opinions are sometimes even
discarded.
This behavior has particularly negative consequences when dealing with
information that is expected and intended to be subject to diverse opinion
– as is the case with news reports, ratings of products or media content,
customer reviews, or any other type of subjective assessment. The same
negative effects apply in a community-driven environment that is designed
for collaboration – the most obvious example here being Wikipedia and the
blogosphere. The information diversity exposed in such an environment,
impressive both with respect to scale and the richness of opinions and
viewpoints expressed, cannot be handled without adequate computer support
in an economically feasible manner. In the long run, maintaining the
current state-of-affairs will change the ways and the extent to which
people are informed (or not) on a particular topic, tremendously
influencing how they look into that topic, what they find about it and
what they think about it.
On top of all this, it is meanwhile acknowledged that the current state of
affairs hampers true collaboration. Wikipedia is a tremendous success, but
it is also a largely meritocratic system with a decreasing number of
active contributors, whereas the blogosphere has to deal with the limited
attention of the blog authors. What is needed are novel concepts, methods
and tools that allow humans and machines to leverage the huge amounts of
information created by a community, based on interaction models that
support expressing, communicating and reasoning about divergent models
simultaneously. This would not only enhance true collaboration, but would
also significantly improve various aspects of the information management
life cycle, thus addressing information overload in sectors which rely on
opinions-driven information sources and mass participation – news,
ratings, reviews, and social and information sharing portals of any kind.
== Goal of the workshop ==
The overall aim of this workshop is to provide an interdisciplinary forum
for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss their ideas
related to the challenges posed by diversity on the Web. We aim to address
a wide array of interdisciplinary questions, which need to be tackled in
order to preserve the fragile balance between a world that is continually
converging and growing together, the rich diversity of the global society,
and the dangers of fragmentation and splintering. This includes but is not
limited to questions such as ‘How to model diversity?’, ‘How to discover
bias and opinion in blog posts, tweets, forum items, wiki edits, etc.?’,
‘How to rank, aggregate, summarize, and exploit information in a
diversity-aware manner?’, ‘What are the applications of diversity-rich
information sources?’, ‘How can we use diversity as an asset instead of
regarding it as a barrier?’.
== Topics ==
In particular we welcome submissions that
* Analyze the capabilities of current information management models,
algorithms and technologies to leverage knowledge diversity,
* Extend existing models, methods, techniques and tools to accommodate the
requirements arising from paying a proper account to diversity-expressed
information sources and communication and collaboration environments
characterized by a rich variety of opinions and viewpoints.
* Discuss the foundations of knowledge diversity on the Web and propose
alternative paradigms,
* Propose novel evaluation strategies, methods and techniques to assess
the impact of diversity-minded information management.
Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:
=======================================================
* Risks and advantages of diversity and diversification on the Web
* Facets of knowledge diversity and conceptual and formal models for
representing and understanding diversity
* Discovery and mining of corpora for diversity-related information
* Use of Natural Language Processing techniques for diversity mining
* Classifying Web 2.0 content items such as blog posts, videos, tweets,
and wiki-edits by their biases
* Usage and benefits of diversity in the corporate context, e.g. in order
to understand feedback and communication with the customer
* Enabling or improving communication and collaboration over barriers
induced by diversity
* Extensions to Web applications taking diversity into account
* Exposing and explaining diversity to end users
* User experiences avoiding the radicalization of groups by exposing them
to alternatives
* User interfaces allowing the explicit annotation of content with
diversity markers
* Studies on the acceptance by end-users of diversified applications.
We explicitly invite experience reports on topics related of diversity
from the Web as it is used in India.
== Submissions ==
We aim at four different kind of submission:
(1) research papers of the length of 8 pages presenting mature work,
prototypes and methodologies,
(2) position papers of the length of 4 pages presenting early work and
elaborated ideas,
(3) demo outlines of the length of 2 pages, and
(4) experience reports of up to 6 pages about dealing and managing with
diversity, especially within the usage of the Web in India.
Submission format is the same as for WWW 2011 (i.e. ACM style).
Selected papers will be invited for a special issue of a journal or as
bookchapters, pending negotiations.
Submissions can be submitted via EasyChair at
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=diversiweb2011
== Important dates ==
Submission deadline:
* Submission deadline: 11th February, 2011
* Notification of acceptance: 7th March, 2011
Camera ready versions of accepted papers: 19th March, 2011
Workshop date: 28th or 29th March, 2011 (TBD)
== Organization committee ==
* Elena Simperl, AIFB, KIT, Germany
* Devika P. Madalli, Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, India *
Denny Vrandecic, AIFB, KIT, Germany
* Enrique Alfonseca, Google Zurich, Switzerland
Contact us at