IEEE Computer Society

ICSC 2013

Seventh IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing
September 16-18, 2013
Hyatt Regency Irvine
Irvine, California, USA
News:

  • May 31th, 2013 (midnight, PST): Regular/Short/Poster Paper Submission (Extended)
  • May 31th, 2013 (midnight, PST): Demo Descriptions (Extended)
  • July 5th, 2013: Notification Date (We are sorry to postpone this due to deadline extension)
  • The registration is open now.
  • The hotel reservation at group rate for Hyatt Regency Irvine is available now. Please check "Hotel Information".

  • Call for Papers (PDF Version)


Seventh IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing
September 16-18, 2013
Hyatt Regency Irvine
Irvine, California, USA
http://www.ieee-icsc.org/

The field of Semantic Computing addresses the derivation of semantic information from content and the connection of semantics to knowledge, where "content" may be anything including structured data, video, audio, text, hardware, software, process, etc.

The Seventh IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2013) continues to foster the growth of a new research community. The conference builds on the success of the past ICSC conferences as an international forum for researchers and practitioners to present research that advances the state of the art and practice of Semantic Computing, as well as identifying emerging research topics and defining the future of the field. The event is located in Irvine, California at Irvine Hyatt. The technical program of ICSC 2013 includes workshops, invited keynotes, paper presentations, panel discussions, industrial 'show and tells', demonstrations, and more. Submissions of high-quality papers describing mature results or ongoing work are invited.

SUBMISSIONS
Authors are invited to submit Regular Papers (8-page technical paper), Short Papers (4-page technical paper), Demonstration Papers and Posters (2 page technical paper), and Workshop and Special Session Proposals. More information is available on the ICSC 2013 web page. The Conference Proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press. Distinguished quality papers presented at the conference will be selected for publication in internationally renowned journals.

AREAS OF INTEREST INCLUDE (but are not limited to):

Semantics based Analysis
  • Natural language processing
  • Image and video analysis
  • Audio, music and speech analysis
  • Data and web mining
  • Behavior of software, systems, and networks
  • Security
  • Privacy
  • Analysis of social networks

Semantic Integration
  • Metadata and other description languages
  • Database schema integration
  • Ontology integration
  • Interoperability and service integration
  • Semantic programming languages and software engineering
  • Semantic system design and synthesis

Applications using Semantics
  • Search engines and question answering
  • Semantic web services
  • Content-based multimedia retrieval and editing
  • Context-aware networks of sensors, devices and applications
  • Devices and applications
  • Digital library applications
  • Machine translation
  • Music description and meta-creation
  • Medicine and Biology
  • GIS systems and architecture
  • Finance
  • Education
  • Entertainment
  • Analytics and Business Intelligence
  • Social media
  • Information Technology
  • Big Data

Semantic Interfaces
  • Natural language interfaces
  • Multimodal interfaces and mediation technology
  • Human centered computing


Important Dates:

  • Feb 22nd, 2013: Workshop Proposals
  • March 1st, 2013: Special Session Proposals
  • May 31th, 2013 (midnight, PST): Regular/Short/Poster Paper Submission (Extended)
  • May 31th, 2013 (midnight, PST): Demo Descriptions (Extended)
  • June 10th, 2013 (midnight, PST): Workshop Paper Submission
  • July 5th, 2013: Notification Date
  • July 21st, 2013: Camera-Ready & Registration
  • September 16th-18th, 2013: Conference

Organizing Committee

General Co-Chairs

David A. Evans, Evans Research, USA

Mihaela van der Schaar, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Phillip Sheu, University of California, Irvine, USA


Conference Coordinator

Jeffrey Abbott, Semantic Computing Foundation


Program Co-Chairs

Shlomo Dubnov, University of California, San Diego, USA

Brian Harrington, University of Toronto, Canada

Giovanni Pilato, Italian National Research Council, Italy

Mei-Ling Shyu, University of Miami, USA


Program Committee


Workshop Co-Chairs

Shu-Ching Chen, Florida International University, USA

Robert Mertens, HSW University of Applied Sciences, Hamelin, Germany


Industry Co-Chairs

Abha Moitra, GE Research, USA

David Ostrowski, Ford, USA


Panel Chair

Abha Moitra, GE Research, USA


Demo Chair

Jeffrey Abbott, Semantic Computing Foundation


Summer School Chair

Gerald Friedland, ICSI Berkeley, USA


Publicity Co-Chairs

Zbigniew Gontar, University of Lodz, Poland

Rodrigo Capobianco Guido, University of São Paulo, Brazil

Anne Hunt, Couchsurfing International, Inc. USA

Wolfgang Hurst, Universiteit Utrecht, The Netherlands

Leszek T. Lilien, Western Michigan University, USA

Klaus Schöffmann, Klagenfurt University, Austria

Chengcui Zhang, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA


Publications Co-Chairs

Sergio Guadarrama, ICSI Berkeley, USA


Finance and Local Arrangement Chair

Taehyung Wang, California State University Northridge, USA


Registration Co-Chairs

Shaoting Wang, University of California, Irvine, USA

Jennifer Kim, University of California, Irvine, USA


Web Chair

Ke Hao, University of California, Irvine, USA


------------- Accepted Workshops ---------------------

The Second IEEE International Workshop on Semantic Multimedia

Workshop on Semantic Computing for Social Networks




CALL FOR WORKSHOP AND SPECIAL SESSIONS PROPOSALS

IEEE ICSC 2013: The Seventh IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing September 16th- 18th, 2013, Irvine, California, USA

The IEEE ICSC 2013 organizing committee invites proposals for workshops and special sessions to be held in conjunction with the conference.

The workshops will focus on specific topics of the main conference. The organizer(s) of approved workshops are responsible for advertising the workshop, distributing the call for papers, gathering submissions, and conducting the paper review process.

Any general questions regarding ICSC 2013 Workshops and workshop or special session proposals should be directed to the Workshop Co-Chairs by using the following email address:

icsc.ws.2013@gmail.com

Please add [ICSC2013-WS-Proposal] as subject.

Important Dates:

Feb 22nd, 2013: Special Session Proposals
Feb 22nd, 2013: Workshop Proposals

-------------------------------------------------------------

Note:
1. Every paper accepted for publication in the Proceedings of ICSC 2013 MUST be presented during the conference.
2. Every paper accepted for ICSC 2013 MUST have attached to it at least one registration at the full member/nonmember rate. Thus, for a paper for which all authors are students, one student author will be required to register at the full registration rate.

International Workshop on

Semantic Search Engines (SSE2010)

in conjunction with
Fourth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing
September 22-24, 2010


While traditional search technologies were designed based on textual data using a keyword search approach, we define a “Semantic Search Engine” (SSE) to be a search (including problem solving) engine of heterogeneous sources addressing computational content of all types, and is accessed by the user via a natural interface.

Authors are invited to submit original and research papers addressing technical issues, solutions and technologies related to Semantic Search Engines. All submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of an international program committee. It is expected that the proceedings of the workshop programs will be published together with the main conference proceedings by IEEE CS press.

Submission: Manuscripts must be sent to psheu@uci.edu by June 15. Regular Papers should be no longer than six (6) pages.

Organizers of the workshop include:

Gerald Friedland, ICSI, Berkeley
Arif Ghafoor, Purdue University
Atsushi Kitazawa, NEC, Japan
Sang-goo Lee, Seoul National University, Korea
Max Mühlhäuser, Darmstadt University, Germany
Raymond Paul, U.S. Department of Defense
Phillip Sheu, University of California, Irvine
Mei-Ling Shyu, University of Miami
Jaideep Shrivastava, University of Minnesota
Jeffrey Tsai, University of Illinois, Chicago
Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Chuo University, Japan

The conference will take place at the University Center of CMU – west of the stadium

Campus Map


Travel:
http://www.cmu.edu/about/visit/directions-parking.shtml

Pittsburgh Airport Flyer:
http://www.portauthority.org/PAAC/tabid/241/default.aspx



Keynotes

keynote
Making Search Smarter: Semantics, Google’s Knowledge Graph, and the Future of Search
by Aaron Brown,
Google Inc.

Abstract
Speaker Bio


keynote
It is 2013 - Do you know where your money is?
by Dennis E. Wisnosky,
formerly, U.S. Department of Defense

Abstract
Slides
Speaker Bio


keynote
Complex event handling with Semantic Technology
by Jans Aasman,
Franz Inc.

Abstract
Speaker Bio


keynote
A “Kansei” Multimedia Computing System for Environmental Analysis and Cross-Cultural Communication
by Yasushi Kiyoki,
Graduate School of Media and Governance,
Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University

Abstract
Speaker Bio
Making Search Smarter: Semantics, Google’s Knowledge Graph, and the Future of Search

by Aaron Brown,
Google Inc.

Ever since the Starship Enterprise first took to the skies decades ago, many of us have dreamed of realizing the “Star Trek Computer” -- the perfect assistant that provides the right information at the right time (sometimes without even having to ask), answers questions in context, and helps you arrive at deeper insights about the world -- all in a fluent natural-language conversation. At Google, we’ve taken this vision to heart, and are working to transform search from its origins as an index of web links and text strings to an interactive, semantically-aware knowledge engine that understands the real world and starts to show the kind of contextual understanding and natural interaction of a truly intelligent computer.

In this talk we’ll describe our vision of the future of search and how we’re getting closer to achieving it: how we’re modeling the semantics of real-world entities with Google’s Knowledge Graph; how we’re using the Knowledge Graph to create a practical application of semantic understanding that operates at the scale of hundreds of millions of searches per day; how we’re extending search with question-answering and natural-language conversational interfaces that take us closer to that Star Trek computer vision; and how we’re making search more proactive, so it anticipates needs rather than just reacting to them. We’ll also discuss some of the challenges we’ve had to overcome of building semantic technologies that meet our users’ expectations and work at Google’s scale.

back to keynotes
Aaron Brown
Google Inc.

Aaron Brown, PhD is a senior product manager for Google, where he leads key aspects of the Knowledge Graph initiative that is bringing an understanding of real-world people, places, and things to Google Search. Previously, Dr. Brown was the senior product manager for Google’s healthcare-related products including Google Health and health-related search features, and for other initiatives in the Google product portfolio. Before joining Google in 2010, he was a director at IBM responsible for IBM's portfolio of information access, search, and text analytic software products and solutions. At IBM, Dr. Brown also held roles in strategic alliance development for IBM Software Group and as a research staff member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He received his PhD and MS in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and an AB in Computer Science from Harvard College.

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It is 2013 - Do you know where your money is?

by Dennis E. Wisnosky,
Formerly Chief Architect and Chief Technical Officer of the Department of Defense

Since leaving the DoD, I have been engaged with the Enterprise Data Management Council (EDMC) in building the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO). The key objective is transparency and confidence in data for risk assessment and ensuring the financial stability of our system. In addition, the process that the financial industry and the regulatory community is engaged in associated with data management is hugely inefficient. The primary goal is transparency/financial stability. The bonus goal is operational efficiency. We can make the process more effective and do so with operational Wizdom (sic).

The idea of FIBO is that it will serve as the lingua franca for the financial industry both for the regulators (FDIC, SEC, CFTC, etc) and the operators (banks, traders, etc.). Imagine if the regulations could really be understood in a uniform manner by the operators, and the data being provided by the operators could really be understood by the regulators? It is estimated by American Banker that each operator spends $150M-$300M a year on compliance with no business benefit. They want to stop this. The regulators agree, and want 100% assurance of the provenance of the data that they are receiving.

The State of the Art of IT in the financial industry has been shocking to me. After a 60 day survey of CTO’s, CIO’s and CRO’s in the major Western operators and their service providers, I presented a no holds barred statement of the problems. They begin with the consolidation of banks as a result to the 2008 crash caused a culture shock that has yet to be overcome within the operators. They end with the signing of a nearly 900 page Dodd-Frank bill 2 years ago that today is 9000 pages of rules. The law firm David Polk & Wardell LLP, did a study that shows how 46 rules written by four different regulators that cover just one aspect of the financial markets -- interest-rate swaps -- have literally thousands of references to other rules.

All of this is the sweet spot of Semantic Web Technology. The good news is that the Financial Industry gets it. The bad news is that based on my own research and the results of a FIBO Technology Summit held this past June, there is much work that must be done in this field for the technology to scale to meet both the people facing and the machine facing needs of the Financial Industry. In this talk I will discuss the promise and the status of FIBO contrasted with the State of the Art of the technology.

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Dennis E. Wisnosky
Formerly Chief Architect and Chief Technical Officer of the Department of Defense

Labeled a visionary early in his career, Wisnosky accepts that tag if it means clearly being able to see the confluence of technology and social trends before others – and most importantly being able to define a clear path to an achievable practical end goal.

He has served as: Director in a Fortune 500 company, Group Vice President in a Mid Tier High Tech Company, CEO of his own companies which develop technology ranging from factory controllers to BPR and Business Process Modeling, and two separate tours with the US DoD most recently as the CTO and CA for the Business Mission Area.

Currently, Mr. Wisnosky is performing in multiple roles. Leader of Wizdom Systems, Inc. Senior advisor and expert consultant to the Enterprise Data Management Council (EDMC). Technical Advisory Board of Cleversafe, Inc. Board of Directors of the Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI). Chairman of the Board of Cyberavnet.

He has received many accolades and awards for his work including a Fed100 Award (2006), an “Excellence in Government Leadership Award (2011). He was named a "Hero of US Manufacturing" by Fortune Magazine in 1997.

Mr. Wisnosky earned Degrees from California University (PA) from which he received “the” W.S Jackson Medallion of Distinction in 1992 and “the” University Medallion of Distinction 2008, the University of Dayton, and the University of Pittsburgh and from which he received “the” Distinguished Alumni Award from the School of Engineering in 2006, Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering. He is a Certified Enterprise Architect, a Certified Manufacturing Engineer (Robotics), a PADI Certified Rescue Diver and an Instrument Rated Private Pilot in Multiengine Aircraft. He and his wife, live in Naperville, Illinois. They have three daughters and nine grandchildren.

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Complex event handling with Semantic Technology

by Jans Aasman,
Franz Inc.

Enterprises collect large bodies of data that describe interactions between their customers. Think of phone calls, text messages, financial transactions, auctions, emails, etc. Each of these interactions can be described as an event object with two or more actors, a start time and possibly an end-time, almost always an location and then other properties to describe the event. A collection of events will inevitably result in a large graph on which we can do interesting computations that include graph analytics, geospatial and temporal reasoning. Relational databases are fundamentally unfit to explore the graph within these networks and Big Data solutions (Hadoop, etc) are usually not meant to work with sparse graphs, rules and geospatial and temporal reasoning. The maturing capabilities of RDF Graph Databases have made them the optimal approach to mine these networks that have temporal and geospatial features. This presentation will discuss an application of Semantic Graph Mining using anonymized information from an on-line bank in Asia. The data includes all payments from account to account along with details about links to each other through IP addresses, goods traded, location, etc. We will show how we can detect, in real time, whether an account executing a transaction is part of a group of accounts that is somehow linked to fraudulent activity.

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Jans Aasman
Franz Inc.

Dr. Jans Aasman started his career as an experimental and cognitive psychologist, earning his PhD in cognitive science with a detailed model of car driver behaviorr. He has spent most of his professional life in telecommunications research, specializing in intelligent user interfaces and applied artificial intelligence projects. From 1995 to 2004, he was also a part-time professor in the Industrial Design department of the Technical University of Delft. Jans is currently the CEO of Franz Inc., the leading supplier of commercial, persistent, and scalable RDF database products that provide the storage layer for powerful reasoning and ontology modeling capabilities for Semantic Web applications.

Dr. Aasman has gained notoriety as a conference speaker at such events as Semantic Technologies Conference, International Semantic Web Conference, Java One, Enterprise Data World, Semantics in Healthcare and Life Sciences, Linked Data Planet, INSA, GeoWeb, AAAI, NoSQLNow, Graph Data Management, RuleML, IEEE conferences, and DEBS to name a few.

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A “Kansei” Multimedia Computing System for Environmental Analysis and Cross-Cultural Communication

by Yasushi Kiyoki,
Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University

In the design of multimedia computing systems, one of the most important issues is how to search and analyze media data (images, music, movies and documents), according to user's impressions and contexts. We introduce a "Kansei" and semantic associative search method based on the “Mathematical Model of Meaning (MMM)”. The concept of "Kansei" includes several meanings on sensitive recognition, such as “emotion”, "impression", "human senses", "feelings", "sensitivity", "psychological reaction" and "physiological reaction". This model realizes "Kansei" processing and semantic associative search for media data, according to user's impressions and contexts and is applied to compute semantic correlations between keywords, images, music movies and documents dynamically in a context-dependent way. The main feature of our system based on this model is to realize semantic associative search in the 2000 dimensional orthogonal semantic space with semantic projection functions. This space is created for dynamically computing semantic equivalence or similarity between keywords and media data.

We have designed "Kansei-Multimedia Computing System” for realizing international and collaborative research environments, as a new platform of multimedia semantic computing system. This system consists of two subsystems: (1) “Kansei” image and music search and analysis system for cooperative creation and manipulation of multimedia objects and (2) Cross-cultural Collaboration System with images databases.

As an important global environmental system, we have also designed a multimedia semantic computing system for global environmental analysis. One of the important applications of this system is “Global Environment-Analysis,” which aims to evaluate various influences caused by natural disasters in global environments. Our experimental results have shown the feasibility and effectiveness of our semantic associative computing system based on “MMM” in global environmental analyses.

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Challenges at the Intersection of Semantic Computing with Law, Legal Reasoning, and Legal Practice

by Kevin D. Ashley
University of Pittsburgh

This talk will briefly consider the intersection of semantic computing with law, legal reasoning, and legal practice. Based on the definition of semantic computing in the materials for the fourth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC2010), the intersection of semantic computing with law, legal reasoning, and legal practice addresses the derivation and matching of the semantics of computational content to that of naturally expressed user intentions relating to legal problem-solving or analysis in order to retrieve, manage, manipulate or create content based on its significance to the legal problem-solving or analysis, where "content" includes text, video, audio, services, networks, etc.

The talk will illustrate some challenges of addressing the pressing needs for new ways to relate the semantics of computational content to users’ intentions relating to legal problem-solving or analysis. The needs are inherent in many developments in high tech legal practice, e-government, and research in Artificial Intelligence and Law. For example:

  • In evidentiary discovery, the need to process enormous numbers of electronic documents in terms of their meaning and significance relative to litigators’ intentions concerning clients’ legal claims and strategies

  • In business compliance, the need to relate computationally-manipulable norms to regulators’ intentions embodied in the natural language legal codes the norms are meant to represent and implement and in the principles and policies underlying the regulations

  • In legal information retrieval and modeling legal reasoning, the need to relate computationally-processable ontological representations of legal concepts and their meanings to the intentions of legal researchers and users in retrieving, comparing, and drawing inferences from relevant legal rules, cases, and commentaries

  • In e-Commerce and semantic web-based legal services, the need to relate computationally-accessible resources to the intentions of electronically contracting parties

  • In automated rights management of privacy and intellectual property rights in data, the need to relate proposed data access to the intentions of data rights owners and users

  • In e-government and legal education, the need to relate computationally-processable argument diagrams and the meanings and intentions of legal arguers.


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Yasushi Kiyoki
Graduate School of Media and Governance, Keio University

Yasushi Kiyoki received his B.E., M.E. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Keio University in 1978, 1980 and 1983, respectively. From 1984 to 1996, he was with Institute of Information Sciences and Electronics, Univ. of Tsukuba, as an assistant professor and then an associate professor. Since 1996, he has been with Graduate School of Media and Governance, where he is currently a professor. His research addresses multi-database systems, knowledge base systems, semantic associative processing, and multimedia database systems. He serves as the editor-in-chief on Information Modeling and Knowledge Bases (IOS Press). He also served program chairs for several international conferences, such as 7th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications and European-Japanese Conferences on Information Modeling and Knowledge bases (2004-Present).

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Kevin D. Ashley
Professor of Law and Intelligent Systems
University of Pittsburgh

Dr. Kevin Ashley holds interdisciplinary appointments as a faculty member of the Graduate Program in Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh, a Senior Scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center, a Professor of Law, and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science. He received a B.A. in philosophy (magna cum laude) from Princeton University in 1973, J.D. (cum laude) from Harvard Law School in 1976, and Ph.D. in computer science in 1988 from the University of Massachusetts.

An expert on computer modeling of legal reasoning and cyberspace legal issues, he has reported his research in conference proceedings of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Law, and the Cognitive Science Society. He has also published in journals such as Jurimetrics, IEEE Expert, International Journal of Man/Machine Studies, and Journal of Artificial Intelligence and the Law, of which he is an editor. Professor Ashley has been a Principal Investigator of a number of National Science Foundation grants to study reasoning with cases in law and professional ethics. Professor Ashley is also author of Modeling Legal Argument: Reasoning with Cases and Hypotheticals (MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1990).

A former National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, Professor Ashley was also a visiting scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and a recipient of an IBM Graduate Research Fellowship. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, and a past President of the International Association of Artificial Intelligence and Law.

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Bhavani Thuraisingham
Professor
University of Texas, Dallas

Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham is the Louis A. Beecherl, Jr. I Distinguished Professor in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) effective September 2010. She joined UTD in October 2004 as a Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Cyber Security Research Center which conducts research in data security and privacy, secure networks, secure languages, secure social media, data mining and semantic web. She is an elected Fellow of three prestigious organizations: the IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers), the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) and the BCS (British Computer Society). She is the recipient of numerous awards including the IEEE Computer Society’s 1997 Technical Achievement Award for “outstanding and innovative contributions to secure data management” and the 2010 Research Leadership Award for Outstanding and Sustained Leadership Contributions to the field of Intelligence and Security Informatics” presented jointly by the IEEE Intelligent and Transportation Systems Society Technical Committee on Intelligence and Security Informatics in Transportation Systems and the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society Technical Committee on Homeland Security. She served as served as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer between 2002 and 2005. She was also quoted by Silicon India magazine as one of the seven leading technology innovators of South Asian origin in the USA in 2002.

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Using Semantics to Improve Interactive Information Access

by Lynda Hardman
Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica

Many methods have been developed to extract human-interpretable semantics from signals present in individual media assets. Ensuring that these human-interpretable semantics are also machine processable allows us to identify, describe and connect together fragments of media assets in a rich information environment. Users requiring information are then faced with the problem of finding out what information is available, and obtaining sufficient fragments to successfully carry out their task. Systems supporting these tasks can use the fragments, descriptions of them and relationships among them, to improve both the selection and presentation of information.

This talk will address two issues. Where can semantics play a role in supporting information oriented tasks, and how can they be used to improve support.

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Lynda Hardman
head of the Interactive Information Access group
at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica

Lynda Hardman (http://www.cwi.nl/~lynda/) is head of the Interactive Information Access group at CWI (Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica) and professor by special appointment of Multimedia Interaction in the Faculty of Science at the University of Amsterdam. She obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 1998, having graduated in Mathematics and Physics from Glasgow University in 1982. During several years of working in the software industry she was the development manager for Guide - the first hypertext authoring system for personal computers (1986).

Her early experiences in industry with the development of hypertext authoring tools inspired her towards underlying questions of combining time-dependent documents (such as video sequences) along with interaction through links into a single model. She was a member of the W3C working group that developed the first SMIL recommendation.

Since the development of the semantic web, she has dedicated herself to improving human access to the ever-expanding 'linked data cloud'. Her current research efforts are focused on improving design methods for human-based interfaces in relation to developing technology.

She is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Web Semantics, and the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, and was co-programme chair for SAMT 2008 and ACM Hypertext 2003.

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Foto Jeroen Oerlemans
Music Understanding, Music Semantics, and the Future of Music

by Roger B. Dannenberg
School of Computer Science, Art, and Music
Carnegie Mellon University

Music understanding is the automatic recognition of pattern and structure in music. Music understanding problems include matching, searching, and parsing problems related to music recognition and music classification. Music semantics is a more difficult subject. Music, like abstract art, rarely denotes anything specific, and one can argue that music semantics is an oxymoron. Nevertheless, music can be associated with emotions and many other terms or tags, leading to representations similar to those used for semantic computation in other domains. We are at a time of music revolution where old practices of publishing and recording are being challenged by new technologies and consumer expectations. I believe this revolution will continue with the advance of music computation, which will enable new forms of music practice. Music understanding and semantic computing will play an important role in the future of music.

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Manuela Veloso
Herbert A. Simon Professor
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University

Manuela M. Veloso is Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She directs the CORAL research laboratory, for the study of agents that Collaborate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn, www.cs.cmu.edu/~coral. Professor Veloso is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the President of the RoboCup Federation. She recently received the 2009 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award for her contributions to agents in uncertain and dynamic environments, including distributed robot localization and world modeling, strategy selection in multiagent systems in the presence of adversaries, and robot learning from demonstration. Professor Veloso is the author of one book on "Planning by Analogical Reasoning" and editor of several other books. She is also an author in over 200 journal articles and conference papers.

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Rebecca Crowley
Associate Professor
Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
Director of the Pittsburgh Graduate Training Program in Biomedical Informatics

Rebecca Crowley is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Director of the Pittsburgh Graduate Training Program in Biomedical Informatics. She received her MD and MS in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh, and her post-graduate training in Pathology and Neuropathology at Stanford University. Dr. Crowley was a National Library of Medicine (NLM) Fellow in Biomedical Informatics, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Fellow in Molecular Neuroendocrinology. Her research interests include applications of semantic technologies to clinical teaching and translational biomedical research as well as the sociotechnical requirements and consequences of sharing biomedical data. Dr. Crowley has also contributed to several large scale biomedical data sharing consortia focused on semantic interoperability including the Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG).

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Roger B. Dannenberg
Associate Research Professor
School of Computer Science, Art, and Music
Carnegie Mellon University

Dr. Roger B. Dannenberg is an Associate Research Professor in the Schools of Computer Science, Art, and Music at Carnegie Mellon University, where he is also a fellow of the Studio for Creative Inquiry. Dannenberg is well known for his computer music research, especially in real-time interactive systems. His pioneering work in computer accompaniment led to three patents and the SmartMusic system now used by tens of thousands of music students. He also played a central role in the development of the Piano Tutor, an intelligent, interactive, automated multimedia tutor that enables a student to obtain first-year piano proficiency in less than 20 hours. Dannenberg held a patent for large-scale interactive games controlled by crowd noise, and these "stadium games" have entertained many NFL fans. Other innovations include the application of machine learning to music style classification and the automation of music structure analysis. As a trumpet player, he has performed in concert halls ranging from the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem to the Espace de Projection at IRCAM, and he is active in performing jazz, classical, and new works. His compositions have been performed by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and at festivals such as the Foro de Musica Nueva, Callejon del Ruido, Spring in Havana, and the International Computer Music Conference.

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Shih-Fu Chang
Professor,
Digital Video and Multimedia Lab
Columbia University

Shih-Fu Chang is Director of Digital Video and Multimedia Lab and Professor and Chairman of Electrical Engineering and at Columbia University. He has also led the ADVENT research consortium at Columbia University with the participation of more than 25 industry sponsors. He has made significant contributions in multimedia search, media forensics, mobile media adaptation, and international standards. He has been recognized with several awards, including IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Technical Field Award, IBM Faculty Award, Navy ONR Young Investigator Award, ACM Recognition of Service Award, and NSF CAREER Award. He and his students have received four Best Paper Awards and seven Best Student Paper Awards from IEEE, ACM, and SPIE. Many video indexing technologies developed by his group have been licensed to companies. He was elected to IEEE Fellow in 2004 and was Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine during 2006-8.

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Towards Semantic-Level Visual Search

by Prof. Shih-Fu Chang
Digital Video and Multimedia Lab, Columbia University

With the explosive growth of multimedia content online, researchers have been racing to develop novel solutions for searching images and videos. The Holy Grail has always been a seamless way of accessing multimedia information at the semantic level. However, two major barriers remain in the way – the semantic gap and the intention gap. The former refers to the large difference between machine recognizable information from raw image data and the user desired descriptions at the semantic level. To address this, recently there have been major efforts in developing multimedia ontologies for describing visual concepts, training large resources for automatic concept categorization, and new image search interfaces directly in the visual concept space. The other challenge associated with the intention gap lies in the difficulty in expressing user search targets through the conventional keyword-based methods. In response to this, I will describe two new paradigms. One explores efficient methods (lexical, statistical, and Web) to map keywords to visual detectors and adds real-time interfaces for manipulating queries in the visual concept space. The other completely foregoes the textual query input, instead relies on novel brain machine interfaces and data mining techniques to decode user’s search targets. I will survey on-going research in the above directions aiming towards a semantic-level visual search engine.

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Industry Session Call for Papers

IEEE ICSC 2013: The Seventh IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing
September 16-18, 2013
Irvine, CA

Program Goals and Format:

The goals of the ICSC 2013 Industry Session are to foster exchanges between practitioners and the academics, to promote novel solutions to today's challenges in the area of Semantic Computing and applications, to provide practitioners in the field an early opportunity to evaluate leading-edge research, and to identify new issues and directions for future research and development efforts. Similar to regular papers, the papers in the industry session will undergo a review process and will appear in the conference proceedings. However, the selection criteria for industry papers are slightly different. In particular, papers should describe technologies, methodologies, applications, prototypes or experiences of clear industry relevance. A main goal of this session is to present research work that exposes the academic and research communities to challenges and issues important for the industry. Therefore, the papers in this session will be evaluated primarily by the novelty and applicability of the insights from its industrial solutions, instead of the originality of its algorithmic content.

Topics of Interest:

Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to those identified in the main conference CFP, as well as those listed below:

1. Development of new semantic systems, architecture, and standards
2. Employment of semantic computing tools and interfaces
3. Employment of large-scale semantic systems
4. Benchmarking and performance evaluation of semantic systems
5. Innovative solutions for performance optimization
6. Mobile semantic systems and services
7. Multimedia semantic content analysis and retrieval systems
8. Modeling issues and case studies of semantic computing
9. Game and entertainment applications
10. e-Business and other applications
11. Analysis of industry-specific trends and challenges

Important Dates:
Submission: June 10, 2013
Notification: June 28, 2013
Conference: September 16-18, 2013

Industrial Paper Submission:
Industrial papers should be submitted via the ICSC 2013 online paper submission system. Industry Session papers should be no longer than 8 pages with the same submission guidelines available on the ICSC 2013 web page. Only electronic submission will be accepted. All industrial papers will be peer-reviewed and published in the conference proceedings, which will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press. Submissions must not be published or submitted for another conference.

Industry Session Co-Chairs:
Abha Moitra, GE Research, USA
David Ostrowski, Ford, USA

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Note:
1. Every paper accepted for publication in the Proceedings of ICSC 2013 MUST be presented during the conference.
2. Every paper accepted for ICSC 2013 MUST have attached to it at least one registration at the full member/nonmember rate. Thus, for a paper for which all authors are students, one student author will be required to register at the full registration rate.

Program Committee

Sören Auer, University of Leipzig, Germany
Agnese Augello, ICAR-CNR
Ramazan Aygun, University of Alabama, Huntsville, USA
Kathy Baker, US Government, USA
Lamberto Ballan, University of Florence, Italy
Roberto Basili, Univ. of Roma Tor Vergata, Italy
Ivan Bedini, Bell Labs
Marco Bertini, Universita' degli Studi di Firenze, Italy
Michael Bloodgood, University of Maryland, USA
David Bracewell, Language Computer Corporation
Volha Bryl, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Nicoletta Calzolari, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale del CNR, Italy
Yu Cao, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA
Kasturi Chatterjee, TechnoratiMedia Inc., USA
Chao Chen, Capital One Bank, USA
Matthew Cooper, FXPAL, USA
Jason Corso, SUNY at Buffalo, USA
Claudia D'Amato, University of Bari, Italy
Ernesto D'Avanzo, Università degli Studi di Salerno, Italy
Stamatia Dasiopoulou, Informatics and Telematics Institute, Greece
Thierry Declerck, DFKI GmbH, Germany
Alexiei Dingli, University of Malta
Massimo Esposito,ICAR-CNR, Italy
Alex Chengyu Fang, The City University of Hong Kong, China
Nicola Fanizzi, Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Bari, Italy
Luigi Gallo, ICAR-CNR, Italy
Jose Manuel Gomez-Perez, Intelligent Software Components (iSOCO) S.A.
Thomas Gottron, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
William I. Grosky, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA
Rodrigo Guido, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
Sanda Harabagiu, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
Choochart Haruechaiyasak, National Electronics and Computer Technology Center, Thailand
Takako Hashimoto, Chiba University of Commerce, Japan
Johannes Heinecke, France Telecom
Ed Hovy, University of Southern California, USA
Zifang Huang, Western Union, USA
Eero Hyvönen, Aalto University and University of Helsinki, Finland
Maria Jose Ibanez, University of Zaragoza, Spain
Nancy Ide, Vassar College
Hasan Jamil, Wayne State University, USA
Cliff Joslyn, PNNL, USA
Artem Katasonov, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Finland
Lars Knipping, Berlin Institute of Technology, Germany
Shuichi Kurabayashi, Keio University SFC, Japan
Marco La Cascia, University of Palermo, Italy
Freddy Lecue, University of Manchester, UK
Ying Li, IBM T.J. Watson, USA,
Lin Lin, American National Standards Institute, USA
Dianting Liu, University of Miami, USA
Alexander Loui, Eastman Kodak Company, USA,
Hongli Luo, Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne, USA
Mathias Lux, University of Klagenfurt, Austria
Rabi Mahapatra, Texas A&M University, USA
Umberto Maniscalco, CNR, Italy
Elio Masciari, ICAR-CNR, Italy
David Mcdonald, SIFT LLC
Dennis McLeod, University of Southern California, USA
Marge McShane, University of Maryland Baltimore (UMBC), USA
Farid Meziane, University of Salford, UK,
Adrian Mocan, SAP AG, Germany,
Fionn Murtagh, Royal Holloway University of London, UK
Shinichi Nagano, Toshiba Corporation, Japan
Costanza Navarretta, Center for Sprogteknologi,Denmark
Matthias Nickles, Technical University of Munich
Antonio Picariello, Universita` di Napoli "Federico II"
Roberto Pirrone, DINFO - Universita' di Palermo, Italy
Luigi Pontieri, ICAR-CNR, Italy
Sameer Pradhan, BBN Technologies
Alessandro Provetti, University of Messina, Italy
Matthew Purver, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Riccardo Rizzo, ICAR-CNR, Italy
Marco Rospocher, Fondazione Bruno Kessler
Dylan Seychell, University of Malta
Alkis Simitsis, HP Labs
Nadine Steinmetz, Hasso Plattner Institute of Software Systems Engineering, Germany
Heiko Stoermer, University of Trento, Italy
Matthias Thimm, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Marc Tomlinson, Language Computer Corporation
Alfonso Maurizio Urso, ICAR-CNR, Italy
Filippo Vella, ICAR-CNR, Italy
Marc Verhagen, Brandeis University, USA
René Witte, Concordia University, Canada
Jianhua Yan, PayPal, an eBay company, USA
Ziming Zhuang, Yahoo! Labs, USA
The conference group rate for Irvine Hyatt is $149.00 for single/double with complimentary wireless internet.
Please make your reservation online HERE.

Call for Demonstration

IEEE ICSC 2013: The 7th IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing
September 16-18, 2013
Irvine, CA

The IEEE ICSC 2013 organizing committee invites proposals for demonstrations to be given at the conference. The demonstrations provide a forum for researchers as well as industry participants to demonstrate working systems, applications, tools or showcases of base technologies to the conference attendees. The goal of the demonstrations is to show a spectrum ranging from research prototypes to pilots developed and even products that use semantic technology and provide functionality based on semantics in the context of semantic computing. For submissions to this event, it is very important to describe the demonstration setup, functionality and benefit to the viewer of the demonstration. Technical background discussion can be presented at the actual demonstration or can be submitted as an industry track or regular conference paper; the focus of the demonstration themselves should be to show the functionality to viewers. It is expected that the demonstrations are highly interactive.

Topics for demonstrations include but are not limited to:
* Content and Information Management
* Knowledge Engineering
* Data Mining
* Semantic Database Theory and Systems
* Service-oriented Architectures and Computing
* Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services
* Multimedia Semantics
* Audio and Speech Processing
* Natural Language Processing
* Semantic Search Technologies and Applications
* User Interfaces

Demonstrations are ideally demonstrating a system or application that clearly shows the benefit of using and deploying semantics and semantic technologies. In addition, tools and base technologies that implement or use semantic technology or semantic approaches are invited for demonstration.

Demonstration Setup
The demonstrations are planned to be a single event during a conference reception function, open to all conference attendees, with the goal of open and constructive discussions. One table will be provided with power as well as an Internet connection. Posters can be put up behind or next to the tables (depending on the space) either on pin boards or the wall. Demonstrators must bring any additional equipment they require as no equipment will be provided by the conference.

Demonstration Submissions
Authors submitting papers to the demonstrations must submit a 2-page paper that clearly outlines the demonstration that will be set up and the functionality a visitor to the demonstration can observe. The technical background, such as the architecture or algorithms, should not be described in detail; such a description would be better submitted to the industry track or main conference paper track. Including links to supporting material, e.g. a video on the web or a web-based demo itself, is highly encouraged. All submissions must be in double-column IEEE format and follow the specific submission guidelines on the ICSC2012 web page. The Conference Proceedings will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press and the accepted demonstration submissions will be included in the conference proceedings.

Important Dates
Demo Submission: June 10, 2013
Notification: June 28, 2013
Conference: September 16-18, 2013

Submissions
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit demo proposals to the demo co-chair

Please include "[ICSC2013-DEMO]" in the subject of your emails.

Call for Applications

2nd International Summer School on Semantic Computing
July 25-31, 2010
University of California, Berkeley
co-sponsored by IEEE, Institute of Semantic Computing and STI International

Semantic Computing is currently emerging as a new field that integrates methods from multimedia (computer vision, speech processing), natural language processing, semantic web and ontology engineering, software engineering, and other fields with the goal of creating new applications that connect intuitively formulated user-intentions with the content of data.

The summer school will provide an introduction to the field to senior undergraduate and graduate students. A mix of young and well-established researchers and educators will present recent research results, as for example presented in the IEEE conferences on Semantic Computing. The tutorials will be complemented by keynote talks by renowned experts in the areas of Semantic Technologies, Ontologies, Multimedia or Natural Language Processing.

The 6-day event is taking place on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley and the curriculum will include the following topics:
- Formal Semantics
- Semantic Web
- Ontology Engineering
- Multimedia
- Natural Language Processing

Important Dates:
* May, 1: Application deadline
* May, 15: Notification of acceptance/Registration opens
* June, 15: Registration completed
* July, 25: School starts

For instruction on how to apply and other information, please visit the following website: http://sssc2010.org

Technical Paper Preparation Instructions

Manuscripts must be written in English and follow the instructions in the Manuscript Formatting and Templates page

Document templates are located at:
Regular Papers should be no longer than eight (8) pages, Short Papers should be no longer than four (4) pages, Demonstration Papers and Posters should be no longer than two (2) pages.

All paper submissions will be carefully reviewed by at least three experts and reviews will be returned to the author(s) with comments to ensure the high quality of the accepted papers. The authors of accepted papers must guarantee that their paper will be presented at the conference. Please only submit original material where copyright of all parts is owned by the authors declared and which is not currently under review elsewhere. Please see the IEEE policies for further information.

Technical Paper Submission Instructions

Only electronic submission will be accepted. Technical paper authors MUST submit their manuscripts through EasyChair. Please follow this link (please register if not an EasyChair user). Manuscripts may only be submitted in PDF format.

A copyright form needs to be submitted upon acceptance of the paper and is not required at this stage.

-------------------------------------------------------------
Note:
1. Every paper accepted for publication in the Proceedings of ICSC 2013 MUST be presented during the conference.
2. Every paper accepted for ICSC 2013 MUST have attached to it at least one registration at the full member/nonmember rate. Thus, for a paper for which all authors are students, one student author will be required to register at the full registration rate.
ICSC Registration Information

The registration deadline is July 21 for authors and July 31 for general participants.
At least one author each paper has to pay a full registration.
We accept online credit card payment. Please access Online Registration System to register.
If you are not in U.S., you might need to ask your credit card bank first to allow foreign transaction.

Email any question regarding registration to Shao-Ting Wang at shaotinw@uci.edu
Visa Instructions

Those who need to apply for Visa, please send an email to Dr. George Wang twang@csun.edu as follows:
* In the subject line write "Visa Letter for IEEE ICSC 2013"
* Provide the full title of the paper including the author list and affiliation and the name of the presenter seeking the letter for Visa.
* Indicate the relevant information regarding "Regular", "Short", "Poster", "Industry", etc.
Author Kit:

ICSC2013 Author Kit Link

Important Date:

  • July 21, 2013: Deadline for Camera-ready and Copyright Form Submissions

© IEEE-ICSC 2013