DESIRES 2021: Call for Papers

2nd International Biennial Conference on Design of Experimental Search & Information Retrieval Systems
Padua, Italy

http://desires.dei.unipd.it/

Dates: 14 Sept. - 17 Sept. 2021

SUBMISSIONS deadline: June 15, 2021
Submit here: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=desires2021

First things, first!
DESIRES needs to be done in presence to favor participation and discussion!
Hence, we aim to be the first IR conference to go back to the in-presence mode! This is our bet for this year.
Nevertheless, we are aware of the risks and the travel limitations that could still be enforced in September 2021. For this reason DESIRES 2021 will be a hybrid event. If you could/want to travel to Padua, we will welcome you; otherwise, we are happy to talk to you on-line!

Vision
DESIRES is a biennial retreat-like systems-oriented conference emphasizing the innovative technological aspects of search and retrieval systems. DESIRES gathers researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to discuss the latest innovative and visionary ideas in the field.
DESIRES mainly encourages papers about innovative and risky information access and retrieval system ideas, systems-building experience and insight, resourceful experimental studies, provocative position statements, and new application domains.

DESIRES is about discussing, learning and thinking about new ideas. Hence, no discussion will be shut off with the "let's take this offline" keyphrase, if we discuss longer than expected, we just slightly reschedule the next talks.

DESIRES is *sponsored* by:
EXAMODE EU H2020 project as Gold Sponsor
Bloomberg and Google as Silver Sponsors
Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova as Bronze Sponsor

Keynotes
Brian Johnson, Head of Search Engineering at Apple Media Products. Title: "Apple Media Products Search"

Fabian M. Suchanek, Professor at Télécom Paris University, Paris. Title: "A hitchhiker’s guide to Ontology"

Hinrich Schütze, Chair of Computational Linguistics and Director, Center for Information and Language Processing of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany. Title: TBA

More details here: http://desires.dei.unipd.it#speakers

C4P
DESIRES is a single-track conference. To encourage authors to submit only their best work, each person can be an author or co-author of only a single paper or prototype (plus one abstract). That is, authors can submit only 1 (one) paper.

DESIRES invites four kinds of contributions:

- Papers (up to 6 pages + 1 page of references). Papers usually lack rigorous frameworks, simulations of performance, or prototype implementations but present a radical departure from conventional approaches that enables new applications. Accepted full papers will typically be presented in 20 minutes with (at least) 10 minutes for questions and discussion. There will be a discussant for each paper that will read the paper in advance and prepare questions (plus questions from the audience).

- Prototypes (up to 4 pages + 1 page of references). The prototype descriptions generally are a detailed report on successes and mistakes. Accepted prototype papers will typically be presented in 10 minutes with 5 minutes for questions and discussion.

- Abstracts (1 page + 1 page of references). Ideas that are too half-baked for a paper or demo proposal are good candidates for an abstract. Any author of a paper or prototype demo may additionally submit one abstract. Abstracts are expected to have a single author. Accepted abstracts are presented in a gong-show style.

- *new* Open Problems in IR (up to 2 pages + 1 page of references). This is a new track. We are looking for abstract-like papers framing an important but unsolved problem in IR. "Open-Problems" papers are expected to have a single author. Any author of a paper, prototype demo, or abstract may additionally submit one "Open-Problems" paper.

Format: Submissions of papers must be in English, in PDF format, and in the current ACM two-column conference format. Suitable LaTeX, Word, and Overleaf (https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/acm-official#.WOuOk2e1taQ) templates are available from the ACM Website (use the \“sigconf\” proceedings template).

Publication: The accepted (and presented) papers will be published as CEUR-WS proceedings freely available on-line: http://ceur-ws.org/ (Indexed by DBLP and Scopus). Modified or incremental versions of the papers included in the DESIRES proceedings can be submitted to other venues. The scope of DESIRES is discussing ideas, not tying them.

Dates
Conference: 14-17 september 2021
(Tuesday evening welcome reception, Wednesday and Thursday full days + Friday morning)
Submission deadline: June 15, 2021 (AoE)
Notifications: July, 20

***Venue and Organization***
DESIRES 2020 will be held at the University of Padua, Padua, Italy
We will provide discounted prices and suggestions for hotels nearby.

Best regards,
The General Chairs
Omar Alonso, Marc Najork and Gianmaria Silvello

Gianmaria Silvello, PhD
Associate Professor

Intelligent Interactive Information Access (IIIA) Hub
Department of Information Engineering
University of Padua
Via Gradenigo 6/a, 35131 Padua, Italy
Tel: +39 049 827 7932

Skype: gianmaria.silvello
Home page: http://www.dei.unipd.it/~silvello/