Andre sent me a link to the projects that will be supported by Google for the Summer of Code. The Collaborative Filtering library Taste will get two developers over the summer. That’s pretty good.

I wonder why IBM, which is 100 times richer than Google, never thought of supporting Summer of code initiatives. Take off your ties people and think outside the box a little!

The WWW 2007 Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization Workshop has published its list of accepted papers:

• Learning User Profiles from Tagging Data and Leveraging them for Personal(ized) Information Access by
  Elke Michlmayr and Steve Cayzer
• Network Properties of Folksonomies by
  Christoph Schmitz, Miranda Grahl, Andreas Hotho, Gerd Stumme, Ciro Cattuto, Andrea Baldassarri, Vittorio Loreto, and Vito D. P. Servedio
• Emerging Motivations for Tagging: Expression, Performance, and Activism
  by Alla Zollers
• Applying Collaborative Tagging to E-Learning by
  Scott Bateman, Christopher Brooks, Gord McCalla, and Peter Brusilovsky
• Tag-Cloud Drawing: Algorithms for Cloud Visualization by
  Owen Kaser and Daniel Lemire
• SemKey: A Semantic Collaborative Tagging System by
  Andrea Marchetti, Maurizio Tesconi, Francesco Ronzano, Marco Rosella, and Salvatore Minutoli
• Towards Federated Web2.0 Sites: The TAGMAS Approach by
  Jon Iturrioz, Oscar Diaz, and Cristobal Arellano

(Quick! Find my paper in the list and go read it!)

The 24th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2008) will be held in Cancún, México. This is a generic conference on information systems from an engineering point of view.

I find it interesting that they list area PC vice-chairs:

• Data Integration, Interoperability, and Metadata - Erhard Rahm, U. of Leipzig, Germany
• Ubiquitous Data Management and Mobile Databases - Evi Pitoura, U. of Ioannina
• Query processing, query optimization - Guido Moerkotte, U. of Mannheim, Germany
• Data Structures and data management algorithms - Edward Chang, Google, Beijing
• Data Privacy and Security - Bhavani Thuraisingham, U. of Texas at Dallas, USA
• Data Mining Algorithms - Ming-Syan Chen, National Taiwan U.
• Data Mining Systems, Data Warehousing, OLAP and Architectures - Sunita Sarawagi, IIT Bombay, India
• XML data Processing, Filtering, Routing, and Algorithms - Hans-Arno Jacobsen, U. of Toronto, Canada
• XML and Relational Query Languages, Mappings and Engines - Christoph Koch, U. of Saarbruecken, Germany
• Distributed, Parallel, Peer to Peer Databases - Peter Triantafillou, U. of Patras, Greece
• Web Search and Deep Web - Luis Gravano, Columbia University, USA
• Databases for Science - Claudia Medeiros, U. of Campinas, Brazil
• Internet Grids, Web Services, Web 2.0, and Mashups - Alon Halevy, Google, USA and Sihem Amer-Yahia, Yahoo!, USA
• Data Streams - Ugur Cetintemel, Brown U., USA
• Sensor Networks - Philippe Bonnet, U. of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Temporal and Multimedia Databases, Algorithms and Data Structures - Christian Jensen, U. of Aalborg, Denmark
• Spatial and High Dimensional Databases, Algorithms and Data Structures - Dimitris Papadias, Hong Kong U. of Science and Technology, Hong Kong
• Systems, Platforms, Middleware, Applications and Experiences - Martin Kersten, CWI, The Netherlands
• Database System Internals, Performance and Self-tuning - Natassa Ailamaki, Carnegie Mellon U., USA

The 11th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT 2008) will be held in Nantes, France in March 2008. The conference is held every two years in Europe.

The Discovery Science 2007 Call for Papers is out. The conference will be held in Sendai, Japan this year. The proceedings will be published in the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Series by Springer. This is a data mining conference will all the usual content, but with an emphasis on supporting scientific research:

We particularly welcome contributions that discuss the application of data analysis and other support techniques for scientific discovery including, but not limited to, biomedical, astronomical and other physics domains.

The suggested topics are as you would expect:

• Logic and philosophy of scientific discovery,
• Knowledge discovery, machine learning and statistical methods,
• Active knowledge discovery,
• Text and web mining,
• Information extraction from scientific literature,
• Knowledge discovery from text and the web,
• Knowledge discovery from unstructured and multimedia data,
• Knowledge discovery in network and link data,
• Knowledge discovery in social networks,
• Data and knowledge visualization,
• Data Streams,
• Spatial/Temporal Data,
• Human-machine interaction for knowledge discovery and management,
• Biomedical knowledge discovery, analysis of microarray and gene deletion data,
• Applications of the above techniques to natural or social sciences,
• Other applications of the above techniques.

Somehow I appear on the (new) Montreal Tech Bloggers Network. I am flattered to be on the same list as Austin Hill.

I am generally terrible at networking outside the Internet. It is not so much that I am totally socially inept, but I hate unwanted disruptions. So I am not sure I belong to any Montreal network. But I won’t complain if people think I do contribute to the Montreal Tech blog community.

Richard T. Snodgrass, the editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Database Systems wrote a beautiful editorial (ACM TODS, Volume 32, Issue 1, March 2007) explaining why they just changed the journal to use a double-blind review system, that is, a review system where authors do not know who reviews them and the reviewers do not know who they review. This system is far from perfect, but I much prefer symmetry. Either everyone sees everyone, or else, everyone goes blind. Here is a quote that’s good summary:

Many studies provide evidence that DBR (double-blind review) is more fair to authors from less prestigious institutions and to women authors. Such differences are likely to matter even more for highly selective conferences and journals.