IR-L Digest, Vol.XVI, No.24, Issue 460

[Nancy Gusack Crawford <nancy.gusack@ucop.edu>]

IRLIST Digest                                       ISSN 1064-6965
June 21, 1999
Volume XVI, Number 24
Issue 460

******************************************************************
  
 II. JOBS
        1. U.MD Baltimore: Circulation Librarian
        2. Canon Research Centre Europe: E-Job IR Researcher
        3. Thomas Jefferson U.: Collection Management Librarian
        4. Microsoft: Computational Linguist
III. NOTICES
     A. Publications
        1. JASS Journal: CFPapers
        2. ContentsDirec: IP&M, 00244, Volume 35,Issue 3
        3. [WASHINGTON-UPDATE] -- June 21, 1999
     B. Meetings
        1. IDAMAP 99 - Workshop: Intelligent Data Analysis in
           Medicine and Pharmacology: CFPapers
        2. SCIE99: Final CFParticipation
        3. ACM SIGIR MIR Workshop: Final CFParticipation
     C. Miscellaneous
        1. ResearchIndex (CiteSeer): Autonomous Citation Indexing of
           Web
 IV. PROJECTS
     C. Awards, Fellowships, Grants, & Scholarships
        1. Wolverhampton: Research Studentship: Multilingual Anaphora
           Resolution

******************************************************************

II. JOBS

II.1.
Fr: Beverly Gresehover <bgreseho@hshsl.umaryland.edu>
Re: U.MD Baltimore: Circulation Librarian

ASSOCIATE STAFF POSITION
Health Sciences & Human Services Library
000992

POSITION TITLE:
Circulation Librarian
(Associate Librarian II)

POSITION DESCRIPTION:
An exciting opportunity exists in our beautiful new professional library to
lead and manage the Circulation Department of 13 full  and part-time
employees.  Reporting to the Assistant Director for  Access Services, you
will oversee the daily operations of the  department including circulation
services, course reserve services,  circulation billing, stack maintenance,
in-house photocopying, and  building operations for evenings and weekends.
Responsibilities  also include:
o  Hiring, training, supervising, scheduling and evaluating staff;
o  Setting and maintaining standards of excellence for the circulation
   department with establishment and compliance of policies and
   procedures;
o  Overseeing course reserve service and related copyright compliance;
o  Overseeingcollection control;
o  Participating in the development of short and long term goals for
   Circulation;
o  Effectively using new technologies in the delivery of circulation
   services.

QUALIFICATIONS:
Requires an MLS from an ALA accredited library school and one year of
directly related experience. The desired candidate will have experience
supervising and scheduling staff in a Circulation or related library
environment. Must have excellent written and oral communications skills;
must have excellent interpersonal and organizational skills, must have
excellent computer skills and the ability to plan, oversee and automate
circulation services. The preferred candidate will have experience in an
academic or health sciences library; experience with the DRA circulation
subsystem; experience with electronic reserves systems and knowledge of
copyright compliance in an academic library environment. Involvement in
professional activities a definite plus.

ABOUT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, BALTIMORE
The University of Maryland, Baltimore is the campus for the professions and
is comprised of 23.7 acres with 45 buildings in the heart of Baltimore
City. The UM,B complex includes six  professional schools (Dental, Law,
Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, and Social Work), as well as an
interprofessional graduate school. The campus has approximately 4,800
employees and 6,000 students.

ABOUT THE HEALTH SCIENCES AND HUMAN SERVICES LIBRARY
Established in 1813, the HS/HSL currently has approximately 2,400 current
periodical subscriptions and over 338,000 volumes.  HS/HSL is a recognized
leader in state-of-the-art information technology, and the regional medical
library for the Southeastern/Atlantic Region of the National Network of
Libraries of Medicine.  In 1998, the Library moved into a beautiful and
sophisticated, multi-functional library/information services facility.
Visit us on the Web at: http://www.ab.umd.edu/hsl/

SALARY:
to $35,100

FILING DEADLINE:
Open until filled

ORIGINAL POSTING DATE
2/22/99

SUBMIT RESUME TO:
JD000992
University Of Maryland, Baltimore
Office of Human Resource Services
737 W. Lombard Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21201

Beverly Gresehover
Assistant Director for Access Services
Health Sciences and Human Services Library
University of Maryland
601 W. Lombard Street
Baltimore, MD 21201-1583
410 706 7995 phone 410 706 8403 fax
bgreseho@umaryland.edu e-mail

**********

II.2.
Fr: Tony Rose <tgr@cre.canon.co.uk>
Re: Canon Research Centre Europe: E-Job IR Researcher

Canon Research Centre Europe (CRE) has two positions for top quality
researchers in its Core Technology Division. Applications from experienced
researchers or recent PhDs/exceptional graduates are invited for the
following roles:

1. Senior Information Retrieval Researcher Job Specification:
- to perform research & development on advanced information
  retrieval, multimedia, natural language processing &
  user interface technology.
- to initiate and develop first class research projects in
  multimedia information retrieval.
	
Requirements:
- first class academic background: PhD (or equivalent research
  experience) in information retrieval, natural language processing
  or closely related discipline   
- track record of proven initiative in starting and developing
  new research projects
- the ability to work with product development groups for
  technology transfer 
- excellent software engineering skills in a variety of
  languages including C/C++

Desirable:
- experience of working in industry
- strong publication record
- expertise in the areas of:
 * speech recognition
 * multimedia
 * HCI

2. Information Retrieval Researcher
Job Specification:
- to perform research & development on advanced information
  retrieval, multimedia, natural language processing &
  user interface technology.	
- to develop and maintain prototypes, demonstrators, tools
   and product-level software in advanced information retrieval,
   natural language processing and user interface technologies.
   
Requirements:
- first class academic background: honours degree in computer
  science or related discipline with strong computational component
- excellent software engineering skills in a variety of
  languages including C/C++ and ideally Java
- willingness and enthusiasm to implement and evaluate new
  research ideas
- ability to pick up new skills and ideas rapidly
 
Desirable:
- higher degree in a relevant discipline
- experience of working on commercial software projects
- expertise in the areas of:
 * information retrieval
 * natural language processing
 * user interfaces
 * databases
 * C++ standard template library

Canon has over 75,000 employees worldwide. Since its foundation, Canon has
moved forward towards its objective of being the manufacturer of the best
products in the world. While pursuing the pinnacle of quality, we have
taken the lead in developing electronic and automation technologies to
enhance the ease of use of our products. One key to Canon's success has
been the spirit of meeting new technological challenges and at CRE you will
have the opportunity to play a significant part in this. We offer an
excellent working environment  and a competitive salary and benefits package.

For further details on CRE and these job opportunities, please consult our
web pages at: http://www.cre.canon.co.uk/

Informal enquiries may be addressed to Dr TG Rose (tgr@cre.canon.co.uk). To
apply, please send your CV with a covering letter to arrive by Monday 12
July to:

    Paula Mason (recruitment)
    Canon Research Centre Europe Limited
    1 Occam Court
    Surrey Research Park
    Guildford
    GU2 5YJ
    United Kingdom
    fax:   +44 (0) 1483 448845
    email: sljobs@cre.canon.co.uk

Because of British law, preference will be given to applicants who already
have the right to work in the United Kingdom.

**********

II.3.
Fr: Diana Zinnato <zinnato@jeflin.tju.edu>
Re: Thomas Jefferson U.: Collection Management Librarian

COLLECTION MANAGEMENT LIBRARIAN
The Scott Memorial Library at Thomas Jefferson University has an opening
for the position Collection Management Librarian. Responsibilities include
assuming a leadership role in all aspects of serials and interlibrary loan
management including collection evaluation and monitoring the space needs
of the journal collection.  This position also manages binding and other
preservation activities.  Some reference desk service is required.  Reports
to the Director of Collection Management and supervises 5 technicians.
Required qualifications: MLS from an ALA accredited institution, a minimum
of 3 years professional supervisory experience in serials work, a working
knowledge of an ILS serials module, the use of OCLC and other automated
library systems for ILL.  Salary minimum is $34,000 and we offer excellent
flexible benefits including 100% tuition reimbursement.  Qualified
candidates may send their resume to: Doug Block, Business Manager, Scott
Memorial Library, Thomas Jefferson University, 1020 Walnut St.,
Philadelphia, PA 19107-5587. 

Thomas Jefferson University is an academic health center consisting of
amedical college, college of allied health sciences, college of graduate
studies and hospital. Located in center-city Philadelphia, a short walk
from museums and historic sites, Scott Memorial Library is a department of
Academic Information Services and Research (AISR) which is comprised of the
Library, Medical Media Services and the Office of Academic Computing.  AISR
has a staff of 64 FTE employees and an annual operating budget of $4 million. 

**********

II.4.
Fr: David Parkinson <davpark@microsoft.com>
Re: Microsoft: Computational Linguist

Enabling computers to understand natural language is a difficult and
fascinating task. Microsoft has amassed some of the top linguists in the
world, and the company is creating high quality linguistic features such as
grammar checkers, search engines, and eventually machine translation.

The Natural Language Group (NLG) is the central organization for developing
and shipping advanced linguistic technology in Microsoft products. This
strategic and growing group is critical for making software easier for
customers to use, and is central to the company's future. Our features ship
in all of Microsoft's key applications and systems products, including
Office, Windows, and several consumer applications.

COMPUTATIONAL LINGUIST (SEARCH)
The Search linguist is responsible for the application of statistical and
NLP techniques to improve results of information retrieval, and will
identify problems to address in order to move toward information analysis.
Qualifications should include experience (industry or research) in
information retrieval or linguistics, and software development; familiarity
with natural language processing; and an advanced degree in linguistics,
computer science, or a closely related discipline. Practical experience
with, and interest in, data analysis, statistical tools, IR techniques, NLP
implementation issues, and product development are highly desirable
attributes. Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer and supports
workforce diversity.  

Please send your CV in ASCII text or as a Word attachment to
nljobs@microsoft.com <mailto:nljobs@microsoft.com> .

******************************************************************

III. NOTICES

III.A.1.
Fr: Nikitas Assimakopoulos <assinik@unipi.gr>
Re: JASS Journal: CFPapers

JOURNAL OF APPLIED SYSTEMS STUDIES
Methodologies and Applications for Systems Approaches
[ JASS ]
http://www.unipi.gr/jass/
CALL FOR PAPERS

Topics of interest to JASS include :

· Applications of cybernetics using the viable system model
· Applications of interactive planning methodology
· Applications of soft systems methodology
· Applied cybernetics in medicine
· Applied living systems
· Applied sociocybernetics
· Cognitive patterns
· Complex systems
· Conceptual systemic models
· Control systems
· Critical systems thinking
· Culture of peace
· Decision support systems
· Dynamical systems approaches
· Electronic service systems (Internet, Intranet, Extranet, Deltanet)
· Human-centered systems
· Human-computer interaction
· Intelligent systems engineering
· Intelligent tutoring systems
· Knowledge based systems
· Law systems
· Multimedia systems
· Problem structuring approaches
· Project management using systemic approaches
· Religious systems
· Semiotic approaches
· Social systems design
· Systemic metaphors
· Systemic reengineering
· Systems - metasystems and decisions - metadecisions
· Systems and design education
· Systems approaches for information systems
· Systems thinking for total quality management
· Total systems intervention
· Virtual communities

There is no time limit for the submission of papers.

**********

III.A.2.
Fr: cdmailer@elsevier.co.uk
Re: ContentsDirec: IP&M, 00244, Volume 35,Issue 3

             ContentsDirect from Elsevier Science

URL: http://www.elsevier.nl/locate/jnlnr/00244

Journal: Information Processing and Management
ISSN   : 0306-4573
Volume : 35
Issue  : 3
Date   : 01-Jul-1999

pp 219-225
Progress toward digital libraries:  augmentation through integration
G Marchionini, EA Fox

pp 227-243
What are digital libraries?   Competing visions
CL Borgman

pp 245-254
Delphi study of digital libraries
TR Kochtanek, HK Hein

pp 255-279
Document structure and digital liabraries:  how researchers mobilize
information in journal articles
A Peterson Bishop

pp 281-291
Digital library support for scholarly research
RR Downs, EA Friedman

pp 293-316
Material mastery:  situating digital library use in university research
practices
LM Covi

pp 317-336
Content locality in distributed digital libraries
CL Viles, JC French

pp 337-362
Discriminating meta-search:  a framework for evaluation
MH Chignell, J Gwizdka, C Bodner

pp 363-379
Support for interactive document selection in cross-language information
retrieval
DW Oard, P Resnik

pp 381-400
Real time video scene detection and classification
JM Gauch, S Gauch, S Bouix, X Zhu

pp 401-420
Visualising semantic spaces and author co-citation networks in digital
libraries
C Chen

If you have any questions about ContentsDirect, please send an e-mail to:

    CDhelp@elsevier.co.uk

An automatic reply only will be returned with information and instructions.

Copyright Elsevier Science Ltd, 1999

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the publisher, Elsevier Science Ltd, The
Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, UK.

No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage
to persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or
otherwise, or from any use or operation of any methods, products,
instructions or ideas contained in the material herein.

Users should take note that information contained in ContentsDirect is
derived directly from a production tracking system which is unchecked and
may well be revised or modified in future.

**********

III.A.3.
Fr: EDUCAUSE <EDUCAUSE@EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Re: [WASHINGTON-UPDATE] -- June 21, 1999

Internet Gambling Bill Goes to Senate Floor for Second Time

EDUCAUSE: Transforming Education through Information Technologies
http://www.educause.edu

EDUCAUSE WASHINGTON UPDATE --- JUNE 21, 1999

***IN THIS ISSUE***

INTERNET GAMBLING BILL GOES TO SENATE FLOOR FOR SECOND TIME

SENATE PASSES Y2K LIABILITY LIMITATION BILL UPCOMING EVENTS:

  1) COPYRIGHT AND DIGITAL DISTANCE EDUCATION:  HOUSE JUDICIARY
     SUBCOMMITTEE TO HOLD HEARING ON COPYRIGHT OFFICE REPORT

  2) SENATE COMMERCE COMMITTEE TO VOTE ON INTERNET FILTERING
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Written from EDUCAUSE'S Washington office, "The EDUCAUSE Washington Update"
is a free service of EDUCAUSE, an international nonprofit association
dedicated to transforming higher education through information technologies.

Anyone may subscribe to the Update by sending e-mail to
listserv@listserv.educause.edu with "subscribe update firstname lastname"
in the body of the message.  To unsubscribe, send  a "signoff update"
command to the same address. If you would like more information about the
Update or would like to offer comments or suggestions, please contact
Garret Sern at gsern@educause.edu.

**********

III.B.1.
Fr: Silvia Miksch <silvia@ifs.tuwien.ac.at>
Re: IDAMAP 99 - Workshop: Intelligent Data Analysis in
    Medicine and Pharmacology: CFPapers

Second Call for Papers for the workshop
Workshop:
Intelligent Data Analysis in Medicine and Pharmacology
(IDAMAP 99)
Saturday, November 6, 1999
Washington, DC, USA

during the
AMIA 1999 Annual Symposium
November 6-10, 1999  in Washington, DC, USA

(homepage of IDAMAP 99
http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/~silvia/idamap99/
(homepage of AMIA 1999
http://www.amia.org/meetings/f99/call/cover.htm)

Important dates
* Submission deadline:       July 26, 1999
* Notification to authors:   September 6, 1999
* Camera-ready paper:        October 11, 1999 
* Conference:                November 6-10, 1999
* Workshop:                November 6, 1999

GENERAL INFORMATION:
IDAMAP-99 is a Workshop at the AMIA 1999 Annual Symposium - November 6-10,
1999 - Washington, DC prior to the start of the main AMIA conference. 

Gathering in an informal setting, workshop participants will have the
opportunity to meet and discuss selected technical topics in an atmosphere,
which fosters the active exchange of ideas among researchers and
practitioners. To encourage interaction and a broad exchange of ideas, the
workshop will be kept small, preferably under 30 active participants,
although registered AMIA 99 Fall Symposium members are welcome to attend.
The workshop is intended to be a genuinely interactive event and not a
mini-conference, thus ample time will be allotted for general discussion.
The workshop will last a half-day. 


This is the fourth workshop on Intelligent Data Analysis in Medicine and
Pharmacology (IDAMAP). The former IDAMAP Workshops were held in Budapest in
1996, in Nagoya in 1997, and in Brighton in 1998. 

WORKSHOP TOPICS:
In all human activities, automatic data collection pushes towards the
development of tools able to handle and analyze data in a
computer-supported fashion. In the majority of the application areas, this
task cannot be accomplished without using the available knowledge on the
domain or on the data analysis process. This need becomes essential in
biomedical applications, since medical decision-making needs to be
supported by arguments based on basic medical and pharmacological knowledge. 

The topics of the workshop are computational methods for data analysis able
to exploit the available knowledge to narrow the gap between data gathering
and data comprehension, as well as their applications in medicine and
pharmacology. Expert physicians should be included in the preparation of
data for IDA process (e.g., data representation, modeling, cleaning,
selection, and transformation), as well as in the interpretation and
exploitation of results and their (potential) impact on medical practice. 

Topics include, but are not limited to:

* effective data mining techniques: machine learning tools, clustering,
  etc.
* temporal reasoning: applications of IDA in patient monitoring or bio-
  signal processing, interpretation of time-ordered data (derivation
  and revision of temporal trends and other forms of temporal data
  abstraction),
* information visualization: visualization of medical data and
  visualization of IDA's results, 
* case-based reasoning, 
* construction of decision models to support medical decision making, 
* discovery of new diseases and new drug compounds, 
* pharmacodynamical modeling, 
* predicting drug activity, etc. 

Emphasis will also be given to solving of problems, which result from
automated data collection in modern hospitals, such as analysis of
computer-based patient records (CPR), data warehousing tools, intelligent
alarming, effective and efficient monitoring, etc.

In particular, we will ask the participants to address the following points:
- what kind of knowledge they have used and/or extracted; 
- why they need to exploit the available prior knowledge in their
  problem; 
- how they have represented the available knowledge; 
- how they plan to use / have used the derived knowledge.

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS:
The workshop invites submission of long and short papers written in English
to the workshop chair, Yuval Shahar (email: shahar@smi.stanford.edu),
preferably in electronic format (pdf or postscript) no later than ** July
26, 1999 **. The length of long papers is of about 5000 words (10 pages)
and length of short papers is about 1500 words (3 pages). 

Authors will be notified of acceptance by September 6, 1999. Papers will
appear as separate workshop notes. 

SUBMISSION ADDRESS: 
Yuval Shahar 
Stanford Medical Informatics
Medical School Office Building x215
251 Campus Drive
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-5479
email: shahar@smi.stanford.edu

SCIENTIFIC PROGRAM:
The scientific program of the workshop will consist of presentations of
accepted papers and panel discussions. Papers are invited both on
methodological issues of intelligent data analysis as well as on specific
applications in medicine and pharmacology. Panel discussions will be
organized into two phases: the first one will be devoted to identify
clusters of basic approaches presented to intelligently analyze data, the
second one will deal on discussions initialized by participants. 

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:
Sarabjot Anand, University of Ulster, Northern Ireland
Steen Andreassen, Aalborg University, Denmark
Lars Asker, Stockholm University, Sweden
Riccardo Bellazzi, University of Pavia, Italy
Werner Horn, Austrian Research Institute for AI, Austria
Elpida Keravnou, University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Cristiana Larizza, University of Pavia, Italy
Nada Lavrac, J. Stefan Institute, Slovenia
Xiaohui Liu, Birkbeck College, University of London, U.K.
Silvia Miksch, Vienna University of Technology, Austria (co-chair)
Christian Popow, University of Vienna, Austria
Yuval Shahar, Stanford University, CA, USA (chair)
Blaz Zupan, J. Stefan Institute, Slovenia 

WORKSHOP REGISTRATION:
No extra registration. All registered AMIA 99 Fall Symposium members are
welcome to attend. 

NEW Phone-number: +43-1-58801-18824
NEW Fax-number: +43-1-58801-18899

Silvia Miksch                            silvia@ifs.tuwien.ac.at
Vienna University of Technology     http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/
Department of Computer Science
Institute of Software Technology (IFS)       +43-1-58801-18824
Resselgasse 3/188                  +43-1-58801-18801 (phone-sec)
A-1040 Vienna, Austria, Europe           +43-1-58801-18899 (fax)

**********

III.B.2.
Fr: SCIE99 <scie99@info.uniroma2.it>
Re: SCIE99: Final CFParticipation

Final Call for Participation
School on Information Extraction SCIE99
Frascati(Rome)
June 28, July 3, 1999
http://scie99.info.uniroma2.it/

IMPORTANT NEWS
EXTENDED registration deadline: June 28

The Artificial Intelligence group of the Department of Computer Science,
Systems and Production of the University of Roma Tor Vergata (Italy), in
cooperation with the Italian Association of Artifical Intelligence (AI*IA),
is pleased to announce the second Second edition of the School on
Information Extraction (SCIE99), to be held in Frascati (Roma), Italy, from
June 28 to July 3, 1999 . The school provides a forum for researchers and
practitioners with different background and expertise, to discuss ideas and
describe experiences in defining and implementing IE systems.  To maximize
interaction among SCIE-99 participants, the attendance will be limited to
80 persons. 

CONTENTS 
The school is organized as a set of lectures held by internationally renown
experts from the different disciplines concerning IE themes. These lectures
are explicitly meant to address interdisciplinary issues and will introduce
common goals, needs and problems of the different approaches. Demo sessions
on current IE technologies and systems will be also held at the school.

INVITED SPEAKERS
*Jean Pierre CHANOD (XEROX Research Centre Europe, FR) "Natural
 Language Processing and Digital Libraries"
*Veronica DAHL (Simon Fraser Univ. CA)  "From Speech to Knowledge" 
*Maria Teresa PAZIENZA (Univ. Rome Tor Vergata, IT) "Engineering IE
 systems: an Object Oriented approach"
*Harold SOMERS (UMIST, UK)  "Knowledge extraction from bilingual
 corpora" 
*John SOWA (Westchester Polytechnic Univ. USA) "Relating Templates to
 Language and Logic" 
*Marc VILAIN (The MITRE Corporation, MA, USA) "Inferential Information
 Extraction" 
*Ellen VOORHEES (NIST, MD, USA) "Natural Language Processing and 
Information Retrieval" 
*Yorick WILKS (Univ. of Sheffield, UK) "Can we make Information
Extraction more adaptive?" 
The speakers contributions will be published by Springer-Verlag in the
Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series.  

SCHOOL VENUE  
The school will be hosted by the European Space Agency at ESRIN
establishment. Thanks to this hospitality, we hope to reach a friendly
atmosphere as in the past edition of the school, which enabled fruitful
exchanges of ideas among participants. The School will be held in the
pleasant atmosphere of the historic city of Frascati (near Rome, Italy)

Any information for SCIE-99 participation (registration fees,
accommodation, lectures, demos, ...) may be found at the school web page:
http://scie99.info.uniroma2.it

SCIE-99 Program Committee: 
* Luigia Carlucci Aiello (Univ. of Roma La Sapienza)  
* Elisa Bertino (Univ. of Milano)  
* Maria Teresa Pazienza (Univ. of Roma, Tor Vergata) (chair)  
* Domenico Sacca' (Univ. of Calabria)  
* Lorenza Saitta (Univ. of Torino)
  
SCIE-99 Organizing Committee: 
- R. Basili (Univ. Roma Tor Vergata) (chair)  
- C. Cardani (Univ. Roma Tor Vergata)  
- M. Di Nanni (Univ. Roma Tor Vergata)  
- M. Vindigni (Univ. Roma Tor Vergata)  
- F. Zanzotto (Univ. Roma Tor Vergata)
  
School e-mail: scie99@info.uniroma2.it 

For more information contact: 
prof. Maria Teresa Pazienza  
Dept. of Computer Science, Systems and Production  
University of Roma, Tor Vergata  
Via di Tor Vergata  00133 ROMA (ITALY)  
tel: +39 06 72597378 (office); 
fax +39 06 72597460;  
e_mail: pazienza@info.uniroma2.it  

SCIE99
Dept. of Computer Science, Systems and Management
University of Roma Tor Vergata
Via di Tor Vergata
00133 Roma (ITALY)
Phone: +39 06 72597378
FAX: +39 06 72597460
Web site:http://scie99.info.uniroma2.it
e-mail: scie99@info.uniroma2.it

**********

III.B.3.
Fr: Zhongfei Zhang <zhongfei@cedar.Buffalo.EDU>
Re: ACM SIGIR MIR Workshop: Final CFParticipation

Note that the paper/statement of interest submission deadline has been
extended to June 25th, 1999.

                ACM SIGIR'99 Post-Conference Workshop on
                   Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval
                     Berkeley, CA, August 19, 1999
                      Call For Participation

Background
This workshop is a follow-up to last year's very successful workshop on the
same topic. Since the field is advancing so rapidly, it was felt that an
annual workshop would be worthwhile. 

The focus is on the required functionality, techniques, and evaluation
criteria for multimedia information retrieval systems. Researchers have
been investigating content-based retrieval from non-text sources such as
images, audio and video. Initially, the focus of these efforts were on
content analysis and retrieval techniques tailored to a specific media;
more recently, researchers have started to combine attributes from various
media. The goal of multimedia IR systems is to handle general queries such
as "find outdoor pictures or video of Clinton and Gore discussing
environmental issues". Answering such queries requires intelligent
exploitation of both text/speech and visual content. Multimedia IR is a
very broad area covering both infrastructure issues (e.g. efficient storage
criteria, networking, client-server models) and intelligent content
analysis and retrieval. Since this is a one-day workshop, we have chosen
three focus areas in the intelligent analysis and retrieval area. 

About the workshop
The first focus of this workshop is on integrating information from various
media sources in order to handle multimodal queries on large, diverse
databases. An example of such a collection would be the WWW. In such cases,
a query may be decomposed into a set of media queries, each involving a
different indexing scheme. The interaction of various media sources that
occur in the same context (e.g., text accompanying pictures, audio
accompanying video) is of special interest; such interaction can be
exploited in both the content analysis and retrieval phases. 

The second focus deals with examples of research using content and
organization of multimedia information into semantic classes. Users pose
and expect a retrieval to provide answers to semantic questions. In
practice this is difficult to achieve. Building structures that encode
semantic information in a fairly domain independent and robust manner is
extremely difficult. A quick review of computer vision research over the
last few years points to this difficulty. In many cases, image content can
be used in conjunction with user interaction and domain specificity to
retrieve semantically meaningful information. However, it is clear that
retrieval by similarity of visual attributes when used arbitrarily cannot
provide semantically meaningful information. For example, a search for a
red flower by color red on a very heterogeneous database cannot be expected
to yield meaningful results. On the other hand retrieval of red flowers in
a database of flowers can be achieved using color. In context therefore,
examples of research using content and organization of multimedia
information into semantic classes will be discussed.

Many systems, particularly image and video based ones require an example
picture which can be used as a query (alternatively, the user may be
required to draw a picture). It may be unrealistic to expect an example
image to be always available. Thus, it would be useful to find ways of
generating new queries. Can NLP techniques be combined with computer vision
techniques to generate such queries? Or can multi-modal retrieval
techniques be combined to create queries suitable for image, video and
audio retrieval? In general, a question is how can we create realistic
queries for realistic systems. 

The third focus of this workshop is on evaluation techniques for multimedia
retrieval. Currently, most researchers are using the standard evaluation
measures defined for text documents; these need to be extended/modified for
multimedia documents. There is also a high degree of subjectivity involved
that needs to be addressed. 

Finally, we will also devote one session to discussing MPEG-7 standards and
content. By the time of the workshop, the selection committee would have
made their choices for standards. 

We will focus on the following specific topics: 

- content analysis and retrieval from various media (text, images,
  video, audio) 
- interaction of modalities (e.g., text, images) in indexing, retrieval 
- effective user interfaces (permitting query refinement etc.) 
- evaluation methodologies for multimedia information. We have found
  that researchers pay insufficient attention to it. 
- techniques for relevance ranking 
- multimodal query formation/decomposition 
- logic formalisms for multimodal queries 
- indexing and retrieval from scanned documents - e.g., extracting text
  from images, word spotting - as a retrieval technique for both
  handwritten and printed documents. 
- testbeds for evaluating multimodal retrieval: it would be nice to
  have some resource sharing here since annotating these, and coming up
  with a good query set are difficult 

Participation
Two types of participation are expected. Those interested in making a
presentation at this workshop should submit their full papers either in
online postscript version or in hardcopy by regular mail to the address
given below. The papers should not exceed 5,000 words, including figures,
tables, and references. Those interested in participating, but not
presenting papers, should submit a statement of interest, not to exceed 500
words. This should clearly state what aspect(s) of the workshop reflect
their research interest. These will be used to select panelists. Both types
of submissions are due on Friday, June 25th. Decisions will be made no
later than Friday, July 2nd. In the case of paper submission, the final
camera-ready papers are due on July 23rd. Working notes will be made
available to all participants at the workshop. All the submissions should
be sent to: 

Dr. Rohini K. Srihari 
CEDAR/SUNY at Buffalo 
UB Commons 
520 Lee Entrance, Suite 202 
Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583 
Email: rohini@cedar.buffalo.edu 
Phone: (716) 645-6164 ext. 102 Fax: (716) 645-6176 

Organization
Workshop chairs (also program chairs): 

 Rohini K. Srihari 
                CEDAR, SUNY at Buffalo 
                Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583 
                rohini@cedar.buffalo.edu 
 Zhongfei Zhang 
                CEDAR, SUNY at Buffalo 
                Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583 
                zhongfei@cedar.buffalo.edu 
 R. Manmatha 
                Computer Science Dept., Univ. of Massachusetts 
                Amherst, MA 01003 
                manmatha@cs.umass.edu 
 S. Ravela 
                Computer Science Dept., Univ. of Massachusetts 
                Amherst, MA 01003 
                ravela@cs.umass.edu 

Timetable
Paper or statement of interest submission: June 25th, 1999. 
Decision:                                  July 2nd, 1999. 
Camera-Ready Paper Due:                    July 23rd, 1999 
SIGIR Conference:                          August 15 - 19, 1999 
Workshop Date:                             to be announced 

Further information
Further questions may be directed to the address above, or go to the Web
page of this workshop at

http://www.cedar.buffalo.edu/sigir99/

or the SIGIR Conference main Web Page at

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/conferences/sigir99/

**********
   
III.C.1.
Fr: Gerry Mckiernan <GMCKIERN@gwgate.lib.iastate.edu>
Re: ResearchIndex (CiteSeer): Autonomous Citation Indexing of Web

Posted on behalf of Steve Lawrence. 

Steve Lawrence <lawrence@RESEARCH.NJ.NEC.COM> 06/13 9:49 PM
ResearchIndex (formerly CiteSeer), a digital library of scientific
literature that automatically performs citation indexing is available at:

http://researchindex.com/ 

ResearchIndex aims to improve the dissemination and feedback of scientific
literature, and to provide improvements in functionality, usability,
availability, cost, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and timeliness.

The ResearchIndex software is available without cost for non-commercial
use. The demonstration service indexes over 200,000 computer science
articles (containing over 2 million citations).

Many digital libraries of scientific literature are available (e.g. LANL
e-Print archive, ACM DL, IEEE DL, UCSTRI, CORR, ML Papers, NCSTRL, LTRS, HP
Bib, CS Bibliographies, NZDL etc.). These services offer varying degrees of
functionality, comprehensiveness, and freshness.

Rather than creating just another digital library, ResearchIndex provides
algorithms, techniques, and software that can be used in other digital
libraries.

ResearchIndex indexes Postscript and PDF research articles and provides:

- Autonomous Citation Indexing (ACI). ResearchIndex uses ACI to
autonomously create a citation index that can be used for literature search
and evaluation. Compared to traditional citation indices, ACI provides
improvements in cost, availability, comprehensiveness, efficiency, and
timeliness.

- Information on all cited documents, not just indexed documents.
ResearchIndex computes citation statistics and related documents for all
articles cited in the database, not just the indexed articles.

- Reference linking. As with many online publishers, ResearchIndex allows
browsing the database using citation links.

- Citation context - ResearchIndex can show the context of citations to a
given paper, allowing a researcher to quickly and easily see what other
researchers have to say about an article of interest (useful for literature
search and evaluation).

- Awareness and tracking - ResearchIndex provides automatic notification of
new citations to given papers, and new papers matching a user profile.
Machine learning is used to automatically learn user profiles.

- Related documents - ResearchIndex locates related documents using
citation and word frequency measures and displays an active and
continuously updated bibliography for each document.

- Similar documents - ResearchIndex computes the percentage of matching
sentences between documents, allowing, for example, the detection of minor
revisions to a paper.

- Full-text indexing - ResearchIndex indexes the full-text of the entire
articles and citations. Full Boolean, phrase and proximity search is
supported.

- Query-sensitive summaries - ResearchIndex provides the context of how
query terms are used in articles, instead of a generic summary, improving
the efficiency of search.

- Citation graph analysis - ResearchIndex analyzes the graph of citations,
e.g. to identify authoritative and review style articles.

- Page images - ResearchIndex allows quick and easy viewing of page images.

- Up-to-date - ResearchIndex is continuously updated 24 hours a day.

- Powerful search - e.g. ResearchIndex allows using author initials to
narrow a citation search.

- Autonomous location of articles - ResearchIndex uses search engines,
crawling, and mailing list monitoring to efficiently locate papers on the
Web. ResearchIndex can also be used on existing digital libraries.

- Source code available - The full source code of ResearchIndex is
available without cost for non-commercial use.

A demonstration service is at: http://researchindex.com/ 
For more details or to obtain the software see
http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/researchindex.html 
http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/aci.html 

The following papers contain details of the system:

"Digital libraries and Autonomous Citation Indexing", Volume 32,
Number 6, 67-71, 1999.

"CiteSeer: An automatic citation indexing system", Digital Libraries, June
1998 [shortlisted for best paper].

"CiteSeer: An autonomous Web agent for automatic retrieval and
identification of interesting publications", Autonomous Agents, May 1998.

"CiteSeer: Autonomous Citation Indexing and Literature Browsing Using
Citation Context", Technical Report, NEC Research, 1997.

We currently only have a small capacity machine on our external network for
demonstration. The demonstration service indexes over 200,000 computer
science articles.

Credits: We would like to thank Joshua Alspector, Jose Nelson Amaral,
Anders Ardo, Shumeet Baluja, Arunava Banerjee, Eric Baum, Robert Cameron,
Rich Caruana, Ingemar Cox, Scott Fahlman, Gary Flake, Bill Gear, Paul
Ginsparg, Eric Glover, Alan Gottlieb, Steve Hanson, Haym Hirsh, Steve
Hitchcock, Paul Kantor, Jon Kleinberg, Bob Krovetz, Andrea LaPaugh, Michael
Lesk, Andrew McCallum, Steve Minton, Tom Mitchell, Michael Nelson, Craig
Nevill-Manning, Andrew Ng, Max Ott, Brian Pinkerton, Alexandrin Popescul,
Ben Schafer, Bruce Schatz, Terrence Sejnowski, Warren Smith, Dagobert
Soergel, Amanda Spink, Harold Stone, Valerie Tucci, Lyle Ungar, David
Waltz, Ian Witten, and Peter Yianilos for useful comments and suggestions.

Steve Lawrence - http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/

******************************************************************
IV. PROJECTS

IV.C.1.
Fr: Richard Evans <in6087@wlv.ac.uk>
Re: Wolverhampton: Research Studentship: Multilingual Anaphora
    Resolution

RESEARCH STUDENTSHIP
(Current value of bursary £6,500)

The University of Wolverhampton, School of Languages and European Studies
invites applications for a research studentship in Computational
Linguistics. The successful candidate will work on a multilingual anaphora
resolution project. We are looking for candidates with a good honours
degree in Computational Linguistics or Computer Science, with excellent
programming skills and some experience in Natural Language Processing.
Overseas candidates must have a good command of English. All applicants
must have knowledge of a language other than English.

The successful candidate is expected to start the studentship in September
1999.

For further information about the project, please contact Prof. Ruslan
Mitkov, tel. 01902 322471, Email R.Mitkov@wlv.ac.uk.

Formal applications must be made to:
The Research Support Unit
University of Wolverhampton
Dudley Campus
Castle View
Dudley
DY1 3HR
Email L.Barlow@wlv.ac.u

and must include a completed application form
(http://www.wlv.ac.uk/sles/compling/news/Res17.doc ), a CV and a  covering
letter in which the candidates explain why they apply for the studentship
and give details of their research interests/experience, background,
programming skills and language competence. (Please quote the reference
number of the studentship RS247).

Extended closing date for applications: 28 June 1999.

******************************************************************

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