SPIRE 2018
25th International Symposium on
String Processing and Information Retrieval
October 9-11, 2018, Lima, Peru

http://eventos.spc.org.pe/spire2018/

Paper submission: May 18, 2018 (anywhere on Earth)

***Abstracts must be submitted by May 18th but we will allow papers
to be updated until May 25th (23:59 AoE)***

Notification: July 9, 2018

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LOCATION
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SPIRE 2018 will take place in Lima, the capital of Peru.
The area around Lima had already been inhabited for centuries
when Spanish troops founded the city in 1535. In 1542 it was
made the seat of the Viceroyalty of Peru, which contained most
of Spanish-ruled South America, and in 1551 the oldest
continuously-functioning university in the Americas was founded
there. Lima is located on the Pacific coast and is famed for
its beaches and cuisine. October is early spring and the
temperatures are usually around 20 degrees Celsius or 68 degrees
Fahrenheit, both highs and lows. There are direct flights from
New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Mexico City, Madrid, Paris,
Amsterdam and many major cities in South America, and visitors
from Asia and Oceania can arrive via Santiago de Chile, for example.
The conference venue will be the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología
(UTEC), winner of the inaugural RIBA International Prize for
architecture and described by The Guardian as "Peru's modern-day
Machu Picchu", across the street from the Museum of Modern Art
and a 15-minute walk from the beach.

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SCOPE
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SPIRE 2018 covers research in all aspects of string processing,
information retrieval, computational biology, and related applications.
Typical topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

- String Processing: string pattern matching, text indexing, data
structures for string processing, text compression, compressed data
structures, compressed string processing, text mining, 2D pattern
matching, automata-based string processing.

- Information Retrieval (IR): retrieval models, indexing, evaluation,
algorithms and data structures for IR, efficient implementation of IR
systems, interface design, text classification and clustering, text
analysis and mining, collaborative and content-based filtering, topic
modeling for IR, search tasks (Web search, enterprise search, desktop
search, legal search, cross-lingual retrieval, federated search, (micro)
blog search, XML retrieval, multimedia retrieval), digital libraries.

- Computational Biology: high-throughput DNA sequencing (assembly, read
alignment, read error correction, metagenomics, transcriptomics,
proteomics), evolution and phylogenetics, gene and regulatory element
recognition, motif finding, protein structure prediction.

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SUBMISSION
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SPIRE 2018 invites submissions in two categories: long papers (up to 12
pages, excluding references and optional appendices) and short papers
(up to 6 pages, excluding references and optional appendices). The
reviewing process of SPIRE 2018 will be single-blind, meaning submissions
should not be anonymous. The submission server will be EasyChair
(https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=spire18).
The proceedings will be published in the LNCS series of Springer-Verlag.
The use of either LaTeX or Word LNCS templates is mandatory.
Suitable templates are available at the Springer Website
(https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines).
Do not change the margin size or the font, do not make a separate title
page, etc.: use the LNCS style file as given.
Simultaneous submission to other conferences with published proceedings
is not permitted.

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BEST PAPER
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A Best Paper Award, worth 1000 euros and sponsored by Springer, will
be given to the author(s) of the most outstanding work included in the
proceedings of SPIRE 2018 and presented at the event.

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STUDENT TRAVEL GRANTS
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Thanks to sponsorship by eBay and Google, we will be able to offer ten $500 US
student travel grants. Priority will be given to presenters, women and minorities
in STEM. Applications for the grants will be due in early August.

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SISAP AND WORKSHOPS
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SPIRE 2018 will be co-located with SISAP 2018, the 11th
International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications
(http://www.sisap.org/2018), which will run October 7th-9th.

There will be a StringMasters workshop on Monday October 8th,
immediately before the conference.
The Workshop on Compression, Text and Algorithms (WCTA) will be held
on Friday October 12th, chaired by José Fuentes Sepúlveda,
Paweł Gawrychowski and Nicola Prezza and sponsored by the
BIRDS MSCA RISE 2015 project.
The venue for both workshops will be the same as for SPIRE.

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IMPORTANT DATES
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Paper deadline: May 18th, 2018 (anywhere on Earth)
Notification: July 9th, 2018
Camera-ready due: July 23rd, 2018
Early bird registration: July 23rd, 2018
Main conference: 9th-11th October, 2018
Workshops: 8th and 12th October, 2018

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INVITED SPEAKERS
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- Philip Bille, Technical University of Denmark
- Natasa Przulj, University College London
- Rossano Venturini, University of Pisa

The invited talks are sponsored by eBay, CeBiB (cebib.cl) and Google.

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REGISTRATION
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Registration will include a copy of the proceedings, a welcome cocktail,
coffee breaks, the conference excursion to Pachacamac and the conference dinner.
Registration fees will be in line with previous years.

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SPONSORSHIP
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Many thanks to our sponsors:
eBay and Google will each contribute $5000 US for the invited talks and travel grants;
CeBiB (cebib.cl) will contribute $2500 US for the invited talks;
Springer will contribute 1000 euros for the Best Paper Award;
BIRDS will sponsor WCTA.

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COMMITTEES
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Program Committee Chairs:
- Travis Gagie, Diego Portales University
- Alistair Moffat, University of Melbourne
- Gonzalo Navarro, University of Chile

Program Committee:
- Diego Arroyuelo, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María
- Ricardo Baeza-Yates, NTENT and Universitat Pompeu Fabra
- Hideo Bannai, Kyushu University
- Ilaria Bordino, UniCredit R&D
- Christina Boucher, University of Florida
- Broňa Brejová, Comenius University
- Nieves Brisaboa, Universidade da Coruña
- Ruey-Cheng Chen, RMIT University
- Shane Culpepper, RMIT University
- Fabio Cunial, MPI-CBG
- Antonio Fariña, Universidade da Coruña
- David Fernández-Baca, Iowa State University
- Allyx Fontaine, Université de Guyane
- Simon Gog, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
- Roberto Grossi, Universita' di Pisa
- Inge Li Gørtz, Technical University of Denmark
- Cecilia Hernandez, Universidad de Concepción
- Wing-Kai Hon, National Tsing Hua University
- Tomohiro I, Kyushu Institute of Technology
- Katharina Jahn, ETH Zürich
- Dominik Kempa, University of Helsinki
- Roberto Konow, eBay
- Gregory Kucherov, University Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée
- Susana Ladra, Universidade da Coruña
- Gad M. Landau, University of Haifa and NYU
- Yiqun Liu, Tsinghua University
- Veli Mäkinen, University of Helsinki
- Matthias Petri, University of Melbourne
- Cinzia Pizzi, Universita' di Padova
- Giovanna Rosone, Universita' di Pisa
- Leena Salmela, University of Helsinki
- Diego Seco, Universidad de Concepción
- Julian Shun, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Jouni Sirén, University of California Santa Cruz
- Wing-Kin Sung, National University of Singapore
- Sharma Thankachan, University of Central Florida
- Andrew Trotman, University of Otago
- Przemysław Uznański, ETH Zürich
- Michal Ziv-Ukelson, Ben Gurion University of the Negev
- Guido Zuccon, Queensland University of Technology

Organizing Committee Chair:
Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas, Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC)

Steering Committee:
- Ricardo Baeza-Yates, NTENT and Universitat Pompeu Fabra
- Gabriele Fici, Universita' di Palermo
- Costas Iliopoulos, King's College London
- Shunsuke Inenaga, Kyushu University
- Simon Puglisi, University of Helsinki
- Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Google Inc. and Federal University of Minas Gerais
- Kunihiko Sadakane, University of Tokyo
- Tetsuya Sakai, Waseda University
- Marinella Sciortino, Universita' di Palermo
- Rossano Venturini, Universita' di Pisa
- Emine Yilmaz, University College London
- Nivio Ziviani, Universidade Federal Minas Gerais