Management of uncertainty and imprecision in multimedia information systems


Technical Program

The diffusion of the Internet and the consequent increase in the production and exchange of multimedia information demand the development of effective systems for information access. The main aim of these systems is to provide a fast and effective identification of the information relevant to specific users' needs; this is a complex decision making task, pervaded with vagueness and uncertainty, due to the fact that it requires an interpretation of both the users information needs and the stored information. A promising direction to make effective the information access is to model the uncertainty and vagueness intrinsic in the process of identifying relevant information, and to make the systems adaptive, i.e. able to "learn" the users' concept of relevance. The main purpose of this workshop (which aims at presenting both theoretical and applicative results) is to offer a forum in which the researchers can interact and discuss the most promising research directions in this field.
 

Topics:
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

A selected number of papers presented at the workshop, once revised, will be included in a special issue of the "International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems" (World Scientific).

Program committee:

Catherine Berrut- IMAG Grenoble (France)
Patrick Bosc- ENSSAT Lannion, IRISA (France)
Mohand Boughanem IRIT Toulouse (France)
Fabio Crestani, DCS, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow (Scotland, UK)
Rita De Caluwe - University of Ghent  (Belgium)
Mark Girolami - University of Paisley, (UK)
Dieter Merkl - TU Vienna, (Austria)
Henrik Larsen- Roskilde University (Denmark)
Iadh Ounis- University of Glasgow, (Scotland, UK)
Gabriella Pasi - ITIM-CNR, Milan, (Italy)
Henri Prade - IRIT Toulouse (France)
Jacques Savoy - University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland)
Fabrizio Sebastiani -IEI-CNR, Pisa, (Italy)
Slawomir Zadrozny - Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, (Poland).


Preliminary agenda:
The workshop will be one full day including invited talks, a survey on application of uncertainty and imprecision in information retrieval systems), sessions dedicated to research papers and a panel session with the intention to encourage discussion and to draw directions for future research.

Submission format:
We encourage the submission of research papers according to the topics above. Authors should submit the papers electronically to:gabriella.pasi@itim.mi.cnr.it, fabioc@cs.strath.ac.uk, bougha@irit.fr. Papers should not be longer than 10 pages (5000 words) in the same format than that recommended by the ECSQARU conference http://www.irit.fr/ECSQARU-2001 /call.html.

Deadlines:
submission deadline : may 31th 2001
acceptance decision : june 30th 2001
camera-rady copy due : july 31th 2001

Co-chairs:
Mohand Boughanem: bougha@irit.fr
Fabio Crestani: fabioc@cs.strath.ac.uk
Gabriella Pasi: gabriella.pasi@itim.mi.cnr.it