The 2nd ESWC Summer School, sponsored by RENDER, will run in southern Crete in the week before the EWSC2012 conference –  from the morning of Monday May 21st  to midday Saturday May 26th 2012. Applications are open now until 15 of February 2012! The ESWC summer school will be aligned with the most prominent and emerging topics of the ESWC conference. We will also provide opportunities for attendees to network with their peers, the school tutors and keynotes as well as senior members of STI International and senior members of the Semantic Web community who are participating in the conference.

Keynotes include

• Lora Aroyo (Free University of Amsterdam, NL)
• Enrico Franconi (Free University of Bolzano, IT)
• Mark Greaves (Vulcan Inc. US)
• Jim Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US)
• Chris Welty (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, New York, US)

Topics include

• Knowledge representation languages and Web-scale reasoning
• Linked Data publishing and consumption
• Developing and using ontologies
• Semantically enabled Web APIs and services
• Social semantics

The organization and tutorial team for this summer school have extensive experience in these types of events having organized similar events in Europe, the US and Asia over a number of years. Building from this experience, and also knowledge of pedagogy we know that learning-by-doing leads to successful learning. We also know the true value of networking in the research context and that this is best supported by an informal atmosphere coupled with an enjoyable inclusive social program. Supporting the above will be a dominant theme of the EWSC summer school and a significant portion of the school will involve hands-on sessions with the latest generation of Semantic Web tools.

The summer school is open to anyone studying in a Semantic Web related post-graduate course or is at an early stage of a Semantic Web related career and is engaged in suitable Semantic Web activities. Places will be limited to 50 in order to ensure that all participating students receive quality time with their tutors. Accepted students will be obliged to attend the whole week.

We encourage anyone who is at an early stage of their Semantic Web career to apply our school which benefits from its close association with the conference.

The ESWC summer school is supported by a number of European projects including PlanetData and also videolectures.net.

You can find out more details including the whole program at our website at: http://summerschool2012.eswc-conferences.org/

Dates

• Application opens: December 1st 2011
• Application closes: February 15th 2012
• Decision on acceptance: March 1st 2012
• Summer school: May 21st (9am) to midday May 26th

Fees

• STI Members: 650 Euros
• Non STI Members: 700 Euros

Fees include registration fee, accommodation and meals.

The 2012 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 2012)

May 21 – 25, 2012
The Westin Westminster Hotel
Denver, Colorado, USA
http://cts2012.cisedu.info/

In Cooperation with the ACM, IEEE, IFIP

Paper Submission Deadline: December 30, 2011

You are cordially invited to participate in this international conference through paper submission, a workshop or a special session organization, a tutorial, an invited speech, a demo, a poster, an exhibit, a panel discussion, a doctoral dissertation, whichever sounds more appropriate and convenient to you.

The conference will include invited presentations by experts from academia, industry, and government as well as contributed paper presentations describing original work on the current state of research in collaboration technologies, collaboration systems, social networks, virtual worlds, and related issues. There will also be tutorial sessions, symposia, workshops, special sessions, demos, posters, panel discussions, doctoral colloquium, and exhibits. Conference sponsorships are welcomed. Main track and the following:

Symposia: (all refereed. may have different deadlines)
SYMP1. Collaboration, Social Computing, New Media and Networks (SoMNet 2012)
SYMP2. Security in Collaboration Technologies and Systems (SECOTS 2012)

Workshops: (all refereed. may have different deadlines)
W01. Cloud and Web 2.0 Technologies for Collaboration (CWC 2012)
W02. Knowledge Management and Collaboration (KMC 2012)
W03. Collaboration: Human-Centered Issues & Interactivity Design (CHCI&ID 2012)
W04. Semantic Technologies for Information-Integrated Collaboration (STIIC 2012)
W05. Collaborative Mobile Systems and Sensors Networks (CMSSN 2012)
W06. Multi-Agent Systems and Collaborative Technologies (I-MASC 2012)
W07. Collaborative Robots and Human Robot Interaction (CR-HRI 2012)
W08. Collaborations in Emergency Response and Disaster Management (ERDM 2012)
W09. Collaboration and e-Learning (Ce-Learning 2012)
W10. Collaboration Technologies and Systems in Healthcare and Biomedical Fields (CoHeB 2012)
W11. Adaptive Collaboration (AC 2012)
W12. E-Transactions Systems (ETS 2012)
W13. Internet of Things, Machine to Machine and Smart Services Applications (IoT 2012)
W14. Collaboration in Virtual Environments (CoVE-2012)
W15. Resilient Systems and Solutions (RSS 2012)
W16. Smart Grids and SCADA Security (SGS 2012)

Special Sessions: (all refereed. may have different deadlines)
SS01. Collaboration for Dynamic Resource Management in Mobile P2P Networks (CDRM 2012)
Important Dates:
Extended Paper and Poster Submission Deadline: December 30, 2011
Workshop/Special Session Proposal Deadline: November 15, 2011
Tutorial/Demo/Panel Proposal Deadline: December 30, 2011
Notification of Acceptance: February 01, 2012
Registration & Camera-Ready Manuscripts Due: March 01, 2012
Conference Dates: May 21 – 25, 2012

For further details and updates, please consult the conference web site at URL: http://cisedu.us/rp/cts12/, or contact one of the organizers.

RENDERs 4th plenary will take place from September 29 to September 30, 2011 in Berlin, Germany. This technical meeting will be kindly supported/ sponsored by the co-working space ClubOffice.

All information on the meeting is available at the RENDER internal wiki: http://km.aifb.kit.edu/projects/render/index.php/Plenary_4

RENDER is delighted to announce the first DiversiWeb Workshop was accepted to be organized in co-location with the 11th World Wide Web Conference in Hyderabad, India. The conference will take place from March 28 – April 1, 2001. DiversiWeb is one of only twelve workshops that was accepted in this years call.

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
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?”.

To the workshop page: http://render-project.eu/diversiweb-2011/