Selected Conferences

CSCW 2008 08.11. - 12.11.2008

CSCW brings together top researchers and practitioners who are interested in both the technical and social aspects of collaboration. In recent years the conference has moved beyond traditional "work" to include the broader issues of how we play, socialize, and compete - all forms of collaborative activity that are now mediated by technologies.

San Diego, USA.

ITS 2008 23.-27.06.2008

The 9th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems provides a leading international forum for the dissemination of original results in the design, implementation, and evaluation of intelligent tutoring systems and related areas. The conference will draw researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines ranging from artificial intelligence and cognitive sciences to pedagogy and educational psychology. The conference explores the real world impact of intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) on an increasingly global scale. Improved authoring tools and learning object standards enable fielding systems and curricula in real world settings on an unprecedented scale. Researchers deploy ITSs in ever larger studies, and increasingly use data from real students, tasks, and settings to guide new research. With high volumes of student interaction data, data mining and machine learning, tutoring systems can learn from experience and improve their teaching performance. Increasing number of realistic evaluation studies also broaden researchers’ knowledge about the educational contexts for which ITSs are best suited. At the same time, researchers explore how to expand and improve student-tutor communication, for example, how to achieve more flexible and responsive discourse with students, help students integrate Web resources into learning, use mobile technologies and games to enhance student motivation and learning, and address multicultural perspectives. ITS 2008 will be supported by a strong international program committee that will ensure full and effective refereeing of all submitted papers.

ICLS 2008 24.06 - 28.06.2008

International Perspectives in the Learning Sciences

Utrecht, Netherlands.

Mensch und Computer 2008 07.09. - 10.09.2008

Die Ausbreitung der Informationstechnik in alle Lebensbereiche macht praktisch alle Menschen auf unterschiedliche Weise zu Benutzerinnenn oder Benutzern von Computern. Wurde die Frage der Benutzbarkeit bisher primär für Computer am Arbeitsplatz gestellt, so stellt sich am Anfang des neuen Jahrhunderts die Frage viel breiter. Die Frage der Benutzbarkeit ist eine zentrale Frage in einer sich entwickelnden Informationsgesellschaft. Vor dem Hintergrund des viel beachteten Memorandums "Mensch & Computer 2000. Information, Interaktion, Kooperation" ist die Konferenzreihe "Mensch & Computer" eine Anstrengung, um verschiedene Fachgebiete und Praxisfelder in einen fruchtbaren Diskurs zu bringen und um voneinander zum Nutzen möglichst vieler Menschen zu lernen.

Lübeck, Germany.

GeNeMe 2008 01.10 - 02.10.2008

Internet-basierte Technologien wie das World Wide Web sind inzwischen fester Bestandteil des privaten und geschäftlichen Alltags. In Verbindung mit mobilen sowie multimedialen Technologien und nicht zuletzt durch Web 2.0 Technologien entwickeln sich neue Anwendungen und Plattformen zur Kommunikation und Kooperation, die Nutzer in die Erstellung von Inhalten einbeziehen und Gemeinschaften mit unterschiedlichster Ausrichtung entstehen lassen: Kleine Unternehmeseinheiten schließen sich bedarfs- und kompetenzorientiert zu fluiden Netzwerken zusammen (Virtuelle Unternehmen); E-Commerce-Systeme und Online-Auktionen lassen u.a. Gemeinschaften aus Konsumenten entstehen; Regionalinformationssysteme und Bürger-Kontakt-Systeme dienen als Basis von Foren für Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft gleichermaßen. Es bilden sich Gemeinschaften zum web-basierten Arbeiten, Unterhalten, Lernen oder auch solche mit gemeinschaftlichen wissenschaftlichen Zielen. Das Prinzip der virtuellen Organisationen als Ausdruck des neuen Paradigmas der sog. Agilen Produktion kennzeichnet zunehmend die Kooperation in Gemeinschaften und Unternehmen sowohl inner- wie auch interinstitutionell. Diskutiert werden auf dem Workshop deshalb nicht nur technologische oder ökonomische Gesichtspunkte der Benutzung neuer Medien. Vielmehr rücken auch soziologische, psychologische, personalwirtschaftliche, didaktische und rechtliche Aspekte in den Mittelpunkt des Interesses.

Dresden, Germany.

ISWC 2008 26.10 - 30.10.2008

The Web continues to grow and new technologies, modes of interactions, and applications are being developed. Building on this growth, Semantic Web technologies aim at providing a shared semantic information space, changing qualitatively our experiences on the Web. As Semantic Web technologies mature and permeate more and more application areas, new research challenges are coming to the fore and some unsolved ones are becoming more acute. These issues include creating and managing Semantic Web content, making Semantic Web applications robust and scalable, organizing and integrating information from different sources for novel uses, making semantics explicit in order to improve our overall experience with information technologies, and thus enabling us to use the wealth of information that is currently available in digital form for addressing our everyday tasks. To foster the exchange of ideas and collaboration, ISWC brings together researchers in relevant disciplines such as artificial intelligence, databases, social networks, distributed computing, web engineering, information systems, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction. ISWC 2008 will include a Research track, Semantic Web In Use track, a poster and dem- onstration track, a doctoral consortium, and the Semantic Web Challenge. The research track solicits the submission of original, principled research papers dealing with both analytical theoretical and practical aspects of Semantic Web research. Papers of the latter type are en- couraged to present repeatability of their experiments, and share with the community their data and test harnesses. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following.

Karlsruhe, Germany

OntoContent 2008 09.11 - 14.11.2008

Under the buzz word Semantic Web a lot of research has been going on in recent years, exploring formalisms for expressing ontologies, reasoning algorithms for inferencing hidden knowledge in an open world, but also on "semantifying" different types of problems. But outside the Semantic Web research community, there has been little uptake so far. This is also due to the fact that the concept of ontology is more about content than formalism, and we are in dire need for content-related research and experiences. As [1] stated, a "good" ontology is a balance of the degree of social agreement, the level of formality, and the appropriateness for the problem at hand that is supposed to be solved with ontologies. In line with this view, the workshop is looking for experiences and empirical results on which formalism is better suited, how to achieve or measure social agreement, and how to judge whether an ontology is appropriate. It is the mission of this workshop to report on these experiences and to reflect them back to the Semantic Web community.

In the area of system design, there is currently a major shift taking place towards user-centered design, and the workshop aims to foster use-centered ontology-based system design. Therefore, we also welcome research and experiences on participatory and evolutionary approaches (i.e., with a continuously high degree of involvement of the actual users) to building and maintaining ontologies that pave the way towards a Web 3.0, bringing together users and semantics.

Monterrey, Mexico