***News***
In cooperation with Google the IRF will provide 6 student travel grants for the IRF Conference:
http://www.ir-facility.org/events/irf-conference/student-travel-grant
Application deadline: 14 March 2011

2nd IRF Conference – The IRF Scientific Forum – 6 June 2011, Vienna,
Austria
http://www.ir-facility.org/events/irf-conference/irf-conference-2011/call-for-papers

T H E I R F C O N F E R E N C E

After a successful start in 2010 the 2nd Information Retrieval
Facility Conference 2011 provides once again a multidisciplinary
scientific forum for researchers in Information Retrieval and related
areas. Furthermore, the conference aims at bringing young researchers
into contact with the industry at an early stage. Another emphasis is
put on the applicability of IR solutions to real industry cases and
the respective challenges. A panel of experts from both academia and
industry will discuss the relevance of the presented papers for
current challenges faced by information professionals at the end of
the conference.

The 2nd IRF Conference addresses 4 complementary research areas:
* Information Retrieval
* Semantic Web technologies for IR
* Natural Language Processing for IR
* Large-scale or distributed computing for the above areas

The 2nd IRF Conference targets researchers who are interested in:
* Discussing results obtained by using the IRF computing
infrastructure and data resources
* Learning about complementary technologies
* Applying their results to real business needs
* Joining the international research network of the IRF

All papers will undergo a review process with each paper being
reviewed by at least three members of the programme committee. The
proceedings in 2010 have been published by Springer in the LNCS
series, and we have contacted Springer regarding 2011. The 2nd IRF
Conference is collocated with the 4th Information Retrieval Facility
Symposium (June 7-9, 2011, Vienna, Austria) where leading experts from
the intellectual property and information retrieval domains will
exchange ideas and debate about retrieval challenges in the
intellectual property area.

The 4th IRF Symposium will demonstrate examples of retrieval
techniques developed to better solve the information professionals’
needs in 3 specific fields: Image Retrieval, Machine Translation and
Interfacing. Additionally, the Symposium will give participants the
opportunity to discover and test prototypical versions of the most
innovative technologies in the market.

The best papers of the IRF Conference will be invited to present a
poster and/or a demo at the IRF Symposium.
The attendees of the IRF Conference 2011 are also invited to
participate in the PatOlympics, a half-day event that provides an
interactive evaluation platform where prototypes of state-of-the-art
patent retrieval systems will be tested and driven to their limits by
patent retrieval professionals. The 2011 edition will cover two
PatSports: ChemAtlon and Cross-Language Retrieving.

O R G A N I S A T I O N

General Chair:
Bruce Croft (University of Massachusetts, USA)

Programme Chairs:
Arjen de Vries (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, NL)
Andreas Rauber (Vienna University of Technology, AT)

Programme Committee (as currently agreed, some additional invitations
are still pending):
* Yannis Avrithis, National Technical University of Athens
* Christos Bouganis, Imperial College London
* Pavel Braslavski, Yandex
* Kilnam Chon, Keio University
* Philipp Cimiano University of Karlsruhe
* Paul Clough, University of Sheffield
* Fabio Crestano, University of Lugano
* Hamish Cunningham, University of Sheffield
* Gideon Dror, Yahoo! Research
* Norbert Fuhr, University of Duisburg-Essen
* Wilfried Gansterer, University of Vienna
* Gregory Grefenstette, Exalead
* Allan Hanbury, Information Retrieval Facility
* David Hawking, Funnelback
* Noriko Kando, National Institute of Informatics, Japan
* Udo Kruschwitz, University of Essex
* Marie-Francine Moens, KU Leuven
* Henning Müller, University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland
* Patrick Ruch, University Hospital of Geneva
* Stefan Rueger, The Open University, UK
* Frank Seinstra, Free University, Amsterdam
* Oren Somekh, Yahoo! Research
* John Tait, Information Retrieval Facility
* Dolf Trieschnigg, University of Twente
* Howard Turtle, CogiTech
* Keith van Rijsbergen University of Glasgow
* Suzan Verberne, Radboud University Nijmegen
* Thijs Westerveld, Teezir

T O P I C S T O B E A D D R E S S E D

We seek papers on novel, unpublished research in one or more topics
mentioned below:
Information Retrieval (IR), including but not limited to
* IR Theory and Models
* IR Evaluation
* User Modeling, Personalization and Interactive IR
* Machine Learning, Categorization, Clustering, and Filtering for IR
* Cross-Language IR
* Visualization of Search Results

Semantic Web Technologies for IR, including but not limited to
* Ontologies
* Reasoning
* Semantic Annotation

Natural Language Processing for IR, including but not limited to
* Information Extraction and Summarization
* Named Entity Recognition
* Machine Translation
* Question Answering

Large-scale or distributed computing for the above areas, including
* Grid Computing
* Cloud Computing
* GPU and FPGA Processing
* Parallel Computing

Applications of IR, including but not limited to
* Patent processing for Intellectual Property
* Scientific Paper Search
* Biomedical Information Search
* Enterprise Search
* Web Search

Multi-disciplinary papers combining topics from multiple areas are
particularly welcome. All paper submissions must be written in English
following the LNCS author guidelines. Full papers must not exceed 15
pages including references and figures.

I M P O R T A N T D A T E S

Deadline for Abstract Submission: January 10, 2011
Deadline for paper submission: January 17, 2011
Acceptance decision and reviews to authors: March 3, 2011
Deadline for submission of final paper and speaker registration: March
22, 2011
Early registration deadline: March 22, 2011
IRF Conference: June 6, 2011

For more information, please consult our website http://www.irfc.at
Or, contact the organising chairs via email: irfc2011@ir-facility.org

In cooperation with the Austrian Computing Society and the Vienna
University of Technology.