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CALL FOR PAPERS

5th International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications (SISAP 2012)

http://www.sisap.org/2012

August 9 - 10, 2012
Toronto, Canada

IMPORTANT DATES:

Paper submission: April 9th, 2012 (extended!)
Notification: May 11th, 2012
Final version: May 25th, 2012

BACKGROUND:

The International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications (SISAP) is a conference devoted to similarity searching, with emphasis on metric space searching. It aims to fill in the gap left by the various scientific venues devoted to similarity searching in spaces with coordinates, by providing a common forum for theoreticians and practitioners around the problem of similarity searching in general spaces (metric and non-metric) or using distance-based (as opposed to coordinate-based) techniques in general.

SISAP aims to become an ideal forum to exchange real-world, challenging and exciting examples of applications, new indexing techniques, common testbeds and benchmarks, source code, and up-to-date literature through a Web page serving the similarity searching community. Authors are expected to use the testbeds and code from the SISAP Web site for comparing new applications, databases, indexes and algorithms.

After the successful events in Cancun(Mexico), Prague(Czech Rep.), Istanbul(Turkey) and Lipari(Italy), the fifth SISAP will be held in Toronto, Canada, on August 9-10, 2012. The conference organization is provided by the Fields institute in Toronto. The conference venue is the convenient Toronto downtown.

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Authors are encouraged to submit previously unpublished papers on their research in similarity search and applications. The proceedings of SISAP 2012 will be published by Springer in its LNCS series. A small selection of best papers will be recommended for inclusion in a special issue of Information Systems dedicated to this conference (subject to additional reviewing).
Contributions to the conference should fall into the following categories:

Full papers:
- Basic techniques: general methods that apply to arbitrary metric spaces, nonmetric or (dis)similarity spaces, or high-dimensional vector spaces. We strongly encourage that those be accompanied with an open-source implementation conforming the interface of the Web site and to be tested with a relevant subset of the spaces included in the Web site. This will favor uniform comparison and also permit comparing the technique with future developments.
- Applied techniques: methods that apply to specific similarity search problems. Those papers are also encouraged to contribute with the code and, especially, with the similarity computation function and the datasets related to the specific problem they address (if they are new), for the Web site .

Posters:
- Domain-specific spaces and similarities: papers that challenge and motivate for searching in new spaces (i.e. domain-specific similarity search). This type of contribution is expected to provide a thorough study of the non/metric space properties (e.g., its intrinsic dimension) or the similarity measure, and must include code for the similarity computation and datasets for the Web site . For this kind of paper a real-world domain-specific application of similarity search is expected (e.g., multimedia databases, (bio)chemical & medical databases, biometric databases, scientific & sensory databases, etc.).

Demos:
Similarity retrieval engines: papers that present prototypical non-commercial engine entirely devoted to similarity search applications. The presentation should cover the domains of applicability (e.g., image retrieval system), the architecture, scalability, user interfaces, optional comparison with similar engines, etc. This type of contribution must include either an installation package of the demo application + database, or must be installed as a web application accessible to the SISAP PC.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Range search
* knn search
* Limited-range knn search
* Reverse knn search
* New complex similarity query types
* Similarity joins
* Clustering (applied to indexing)
* Parallelism & distributed algorithms
* Approximate searching
* Computation of intrinsic dimension
* Cost models
* Embeddings
* Languages for similarity databases

SOCIAL EVENTS:
Besides welcome reception and conference dinner, a trip to Niagara Falls with dining stop in a winery will be organized right after the conference.

STUDENT SUPPORT:
The organizers offer partial travel support to graduate students and postdocs. A financial support application web form will be set up shortly.

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:

We remark that reviewing is double-blind, so please do not include author information nor any data that discloses authorship in an obvious way. Submissions must not exceed 14 pages (full paper), or 6 pages (poster or demo) and must adhere to the standard LNCS camera-ready format. Formatting instructions and LaTeX macros are available on the Springer web page. Additional appendixes can use more pages but they will be read at the discretion of the reviewer, so they should not be used for material that is essential to understand the relevance of the contribution.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

Paolo Ciaccia, Universitá di Bologna, Italy
Vladimir Pestov, University of Ottawa, Canada (co-chair)
Edgar Chávez, Universidad Michoacana, México
Alfredo Ferro, Universitá di Catania, Italy
Daniel Keim, Universitat Konstanz, Germany
Daniel Miranker, University of Texas at Austin, USA
Gonzalo Navarro, Universidad de Chile, Chile (co-chair)
Marco Patella, Universitá di Bologna, Italy
Hanan Samet, University of Maryland, USA
Tomas Skopal, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic
Agma Traina, University of Sao Paulo at Sao Carlos, Brazil
Pavel Zezula, Masaryk University, Czech Republic

MORE INFORMATION & WEB OF THE CONFERENCE:

http://www.sisap.org/2012



Vladimir Pestov and Gonzalo Navarro
chairs of SISAP 2012