Call for Workshop Proposals

WSDM (pronounced "wisdom") is one of the premier conferences on web-inspired research involving search and data mining. The Ninth ACM International WSDM Conference will take place in San Francisco, California, USA during 22-25 February 2016.

The WSDM 2016 organizing committee invites proposals for full-day and half-day workshops to be held at the WSDM conference on Monday, February 22, 2016. The topics of the proposed workshops should be aligned with those set forth in the call for papers of the main conference. WSDM workshops provide a venue for exploring and discussing emerging research directions and applications of Web search and data mining, in a more focus and less formal manner than other tracks.

The format and content of each workshop will be determined by its organizers. However, preference will be given to workshops whose format includes sessions that facilitate highly interactive discussions with the audience. Examples include Q&As, debates, panels, or even a competition or a challenge around an interesting and realistically sized dataset (possibly released by the workshop organizers for that purpose). Examples of such challenges include the Netflix competition for recommender systems and Yahoo learning-to-rank challenge. Competition/challenge-based workshops should focus on tasks distinct from the already selected WSDM Cup Challenge, http://www.wsdm-conference.org/2016/calls.html#wsdm-cup.

Organizers of accepted workshops are expected to:

• Determine the submission deadline (As a general guideline, this date should be after the notification date for regular WSDM papers.)
• Handle the full reviewing process, including recruiting the Program Committee
• Prepare a workshop Web site featuring the final program and proceedings
• Publicize the workshop in the relevant communities
• Prepare workshop notes to be distributed (possibly online) to attendees
• Attend the workshop in person, and supervise the workshop operations

Proposal Submission:

Workshop proposals should be submitted in PDF using the EasyChair system (https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wsdm2016workshops). They should be limited to five pages and include the following information:

• Proposed workshop organizers (names, affiliations and email addresses; identify one person as the primary contact person)
• Description of the workshop: objectives, goals, relevance to WSDM, and expected outcomes
• Rationale for holding such a workshop during WSDM
• Description of target audience and estimated number of participants
• Proposed workshop duration (1/2 or full day), format, activities, and schedule
• List of related workshops in recent Web-related conferences, indicating the differences between the past and the proposed workshop
• Short biographical sketch for each organizer, describing relevant experience and qualifications (e.g., previous workshop organizing)
• If this is a recurring workshop (at WSDM or related conferences such as WWW, SIGIR or KDD), the organizers should highlight the fact, and concisely describe past attendance and outcomes, and mostly why another workshop on the same topic or series is needed.

Key Dates:

• Workshop proposals due: August 28, 2015
• Proposal notifications: September 25, 2015
• Notify accepted authors (no later than): December 13, 2015
• Workshops date: Monday, February 22, 2016

All deadlines are 11:59pm, anywhere in the world (Alofi time).

Eugene Agichtein, Emory University (See email)
Dafna Shahaf, Hebrew University / Microsoft Research (See email)
Workshop Co-chairs of WSDM 2016