28th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2006)

	     10th - 12th April 2006, Imperial College London

We are seeking the submission of high-quality and original research papers
and posters that have not been previously published and are not under
review for another conference or journal. Submissions will be reviewed by
experts on the basis of the originality of the work, the validity of the
results, chosen methodology, writing quality and the overall contribution
to the field of Information Retrieval.

Papers whose sole or main author is a young researcher and in particular,
postgraduate student or postdoc researcher are especially welcome.

Papers that demonstrate a high level of research adventure or which break
out of the traditional IR paradigms are particularly welcome.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following areas:

IR models
    * Searching, browsing, meta-searching, data fusion, filtering and
      indexing
    * Text and content classification, mining, extraction, summarisation
    * Topic detection and tracking
    * Personalised, collaborative or user-adaptive IR, recommender
      systems,

User aspects
    * User modelling, user studies, user interaction in IR systems
    * Novel user interfaces for IR systems
    * Visualisation and presentation of queries, search results or content
    * Multimodal aspects

IR system architectures
    * Distributed and peer to peer IR
    * Parallel IR
    * Mobile IR
    * Open, interoperable and flexible
    * Compression, performance, optimisation

Content representation and processing
    * IR and structured contents, e.g. XML based
    * Unstructured contents
    * Meta information and structures

Evaluation
    * Building test collections and metrics
    * Experimental design
    * User-oriented and user-centred test and evaluation

Multimedia and cross-media IR
    * Speech retrieval
    * Image and video retrieval
    * Digital music, radio and broadcast retrieval

IR applications
    * Mobile and ubiquitous IR
    * Digital libraries
    * Semantic web
    * Geographical IR
    * Integration, database and IR technologies
    * Bioinformatics, Medical Informatics and Chemical Informatics

It is intended that all accepted papers will be published in the
conference proceedings by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer
Science series (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/index.html). The
proceedings will be distributed to all delegates at the Conference.

Submissions must be in English, which is the official language of the
conference. Paper submissions must not exceed 15 pages including
references and figures. Papers should be submitted as PDF files through
the conference web site. Submission templates and guidelines are available
for download at the following address:
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html.

Call for posters

Poster presentations offer researchers a unique opportunity to present
late-breaking results, significant work in progress or research that is
best communicated in an interactive or graphical format, for which there
is more time for discussion and questions than is sometimes available in a
full paper session. Poster presentations are also a good way to present
work applying information retrieval approaches and techniques to new
domains and problems. Please note, however, that posters describing work
at the proposal stage cannot be accepted. Poster submissions are welcomed
in any of the areas identified in the call for papers.

All accepted posters will be published in the conference proceedings.
Submissions must be in English and must not exceed 4 pages including
references and figures.

Posters should be submitted as PDF files through the conference web site.
Submission templates and guidelines are available for download at the
Springer authors home page.

Call for Panels: Brave new topics

We are seeking panel proposals that will provide an opportunity for
exploration of current important issues and emerging opportunities in IR.
Panel proposals should address controversial issues in IR and must be
debate-oriented rather than a series of short presentations.

The panel proposal should be a 2-pages document that includes the topic
title, a short statement about the importance and relevance of the panel
and the potential issues of controversy, a tentative list of questions
that will be posed to the panellists, a list of confirmed panellists along
with their affiliation and a short bio of each panellist. Each panellist
should have a position statement or "role" in the panel. The name of the
moderator of the panel should also be provided (in particular, if
different from the proposer).

A 2-page description of the panel will be included in the proceedings. The
panel proposal should be sent to Mounia Lalmas (e-mail:
mounia@dcs.qmul.ac.uk) in PDF or text format.


The important dates will be as follows:
Paper submission: Friday 04 November 2005
Poster submission: Monday 14th November 2005
Panel submission: Monday 21st November 2005
Review submission by referees: Wednesday 7th December 2005
PC Meeting: Wednesday 14th December 2005
Acceptance/rejection notification: Friday 16th December 2005
Submission of camera-ready copy: Monday 16th January 2006
Conference: 10th to 12th April 2006