From: Pavel Braslavski [mailto:pb @ imach.uran.ru]
Subject: RuSSIR2009: Call for Course Proposals

3rd Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval (RuSSIR 2009)
Friday September 11 - Wednesday September 16, 2009
Petrozavodsk, Russia
http://romip.ru/russir2009/

FIRST CALL FOR COURSE PROPOSALS

The 3rd Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval will be held September
11-16, 2009 in Petrozavodsk, Russia. The school is co-organized by the Russian
Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar (ROMIP, http://romip.ru/),
Petrozavodsk State University (http://petrsu.ru/), and Karelian Research Centre
of the Russian Academy of Sciences (http://www.krc.karelia.ru/). The first and
second RuSSIRs took place in Ekaterinburg in 2007 and Taganrog in 2008,
respectively (see http://romip.ru/russir2007/ and http://romip.ru/russir2008/).
Both events were very successful.

Petrozavodsk, the capital of the Republic of Karelia, was founded in 1703. It
is a large industrial and cultural center of the Russian North-West.
Petrozavodsk is situated on the shores of Onega Lake, one of the biggest inner
lakes in Europe. Karelia is often called "stony lake-forest land" and "the
lungs of Europe", highlighting beautiful landscapes created by countless lakes
and rivers and the forest covered land. Petrozavodsk is 400 km away from Saint-
Petersburg, an overnight train journey from Saint-Petersburg takes about eight
hours. Petrozavodsk State University was founded in 1940 and belongs to the
largest educational institutions in the European North of Russia. The
university comprises 82 chairs and employs 3,600 faculty/staff members. The
total enrollment is more than 19,000 students. IT education and research are
one of the main specializations at the university. The Regional Center for New
Information Technologies (RCNIT) of PetrSU was the cradle of computer
technologies in Karelia and celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2011. PetrSU
teams have made remarkable achievements in international student programming
contests.

The target audience of the Summer School is advanced graduate and PhD students,
post-doctoral researchers, academic and industrial researchers, and developers.
The mission of the school is to teach students about a wide range of modern
problems and methods in Information Retrieval; to stimulate scientific research
in the field of Information Retrieval; and to create an opportunity for
informal contacts among scientists, students and industry professionals. The
Russian Conference for Young Scientists in Information Retrieval will be co-
organized with the school. RuSSIR2009 will offer 4 or 5 one-week courses and
host approximately 100 participants. The working languages of the school are
English (preferable) and Russian.

RuSSIR 2009 is co-located with the yearly ROMIP meeting (http://romip.ru/) and
Russian Conference on Digital Libraries 2009 (http://rcdl2009.krc.karelia.ru/).

The RuSSIR2009 Organizing Committee invites proposals for courses on a wide
range of IR-related topics, including but not limited to:
- IR theory and models
- IR architectures
- algorithms and data structures for IR
- text IR
- multimedia (incl. music, speech, image, video, etc.) IR
- natural language techniques in IR tasks
- user interfaces for IR
- Web IR (including duplicate detection, hyperlink analysis, query log
processing)
- text mining, information and fact extraction
- mobile applications for IR
- dynamic media IR (blogs, news, WIKIs)
- social IR (collaborative filtering, tagging, recommendation systems)
- IR evaluation.

Each course should consist of five 90-minute-long sessions (normally in five
subsequent days). The course may include both lectures and practical exercises
in computer labs. A course proposal must contain a brief description of the
course (up to 200 words), preferred schedule, prerequisites, equipment needs, a
short description of teaching/research experience and contact information of
the lecturer.

RuSSIR2009 organizers will cover travel expenses and accommodation at the
school. Lecturers are not paid for their contribution. Details of reimbursement
will be negotiated with each lecturer individually. The RuSSIR organizers would
highly appreciate if, whenever this is possible, lecturers could find
alternative funding to cover travel and accommodation expenses and indicate
this possibility in the proposal.

All proposals will be evaluated by the RuSSIR2009 program committee according
to the school goals, presentation clarity, lecturer's qualifications and
experience. Topics not featured at previous RuSSIRs are preferred.

Anyone interested in lecturing at RuSSIR2009 is encouraged to submit proposal
by email to Pavel Braslavski (pb@yandex-team.ru), by January 31, 2009. All
submitters will be notified by February 20, 2009 about selection results.