3rd Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval (RuSSIR 2009) – Call for Course Proposals

3rd Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval (RuSSIR 2009)
Friday September 11 – Wednesday September 16, 2009
Petrozavodsk, Russia
http://romip.ru/russir2009/

FIRST CALL FOR COURSE PROPOSALS

The 3rd Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval will be held September 11-16, 2009 in Petrozavodsk, Russia. The school is co-organized by the Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar (ROMIP, http://romip.ru/), Petrozavodsk State University (http://petrsu.ru/), and Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences (http://www.krc.karelia.ru/). The first and second RuSSIRs took place in Ekaterinburg in 2007 and Taganrog in 2008, respectively (see http://romip.ru/russir2007/ and http://romip.ru/russir2008/). Both events were very successful.

Petrozavodsk, the capital of the Republic of Karelia, was founded in 1703. It is a large industrial and cultural center of the Russian North-West. Petrozavodsk is situated on the shores of Onega Lake, one of the biggest inner lakes in Europe. Karelia is often called “stony lake-forest land” and “the lungs of Europe”, highlighting beautiful landscapes created by countless lakes and rivers and the forest covered land. Petrozavodsk is 400 km away from Saint-Petersburg, an overnight train journey from Saint-Petersburg takes about eight hours. Petrozavodsk State University was founded in 1940 and belongs to the largest educational institutions in the European North of Russia. The university comprises 82 chairs and employs 3,600 faculty/staff members. The total enrollment is more than 19,000 students. IT education and research are one of the main specializations at the university. The Regional Center for New Information Technologies (RCNIT) of PetrSU was the cradle of computer technologies in Karelia and celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2011. PetrSU teams have made remarkable achievements in international student programming
contests.

The target audience of the Summer School is advanced graduate and PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, academic and industrial researchers, and developers. The mission of the school is to teach students about a wide range of modern problems and methods in Information Retrieval; to stimulate scientific research in the field of Information Retrieval; and to create an opportunity for
informal contacts among scientists, students and industry professionals. The Russian Conference for Young Scientists in Information Retrieval will be co-organized with the school. RuSSIR2009 will offer 4 or 5 one-week courses and host approximately 100 participants. The working languages of the school are English (preferable) and Russian.

RuSSIR 2009 is co-located with the yearly ROMIP meeting (http://romip.ru/) and Russian Conference on Digital Libraries 2009 (http://rcdl2009.krc.karelia.ru/).

The RuSSIR2009 Organizing Committee invites proposals for courses on a wide range of IR-related topics, including but not limited to:
– IR theory and models
– IR architectures
– algorithms and data structures for IR
– text IR
– multimedia (incl. music, speech, image, video, etc.) IR
– natural language techniques in IR tasks
– user interfaces for IR
– Web IR (including duplicate detection, hyperlink analysis, query log
processing)
– text mining, information and fact extraction
– mobile applications for IR
– dynamic media IR (blogs, news, WIKIs)
– social IR (collaborative filtering, tagging, recommendation systems)
– IR evaluation.

Each course should consist of five 90-minute-long sessions (normally in five subsequent days). The course may include both lectures and practical exercises in computer labs. A course proposal must contain a brief description of the course (up to 200 words), preferred schedule, prerequisites, equipment needs, a short description of teaching/research experience and contact information of
the lecturer.

RuSSIR2009 organizers will cover travel expenses and accommodation at the school. Lecturers are not paid for their contribution. Details of reimbursement will be negotiated with each lecturer individually. The RuSSIR organizers would highly appreciate if, whenever this is possible, lecturers could find alternative funding to cover travel and accommodation expenses and indicate this possibility in the proposal.

All proposals will be evaluated by the RuSSIR2009 program committee according to the school goals, presentation clarity, lecturer’s qualifications and experience. Topics not featured at previous RuSSIRs are preferred.

Anyone interested in lecturing at RuSSIR2009 is encouraged to submit proposal by email to Pavel Braslavski (pb (at) yandex-team.ru), by January 31, 2009. All submitters will be notified by February 20, 2009 about selection results.