News

Workshop report is now available here.

Presentation slides of the invited talk are now available.

Fausto Rabitti: The future of P2P audiovisual search (pdf)

Final Program

All sessions will be held in the Crystal Room 3 (2nd floor) and lunch will be served in the Atrium/Foyer.

08:30 - 09:30 Invited talk: Fausto Rabitti, ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

The future of P2P audiovisual search

09:30 - 10:30 Session 1: Resource selection

• Size Doesn't Always Matter: Exploiting PageRank for Query Routing in Distributed IR
  Josiane Xavier Parreira, Sebastian Michel, Matthias Bender
• Distributed Cache Table: Efficient Query-Driven Processing of Multi-Term Queries in P2P Networks
  Gleb Skobeltsyn, Karl Aberer

10:30 - 11:00 Coffee break

11:00 - 12:30 Session 2: Similarity search

• Emerging Semantic Communities in Peer Web Search
  R. Akavipat, L.-S. Wu, F. Menczer, A.G. Maguitman
• Efficient Peer-to-Peer Semantic Overlay Networks based on Statistical Language Models
  Alessandro Linari, Gerhard Weikum
• M-Grid: Similarity Searching in Grids
  Michal Batko, Vlastislav Dohnal, Pavel Zezula

12:30 - 14:00 Lunch break

14:00 - 15:00 Session 3: Systems, applications

• Applying Information Retrieval Techniques to Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Systems
  Wai Gen Yee, Linh Thai Nguyen, and Ophir Frieder
• ALVIS Peers: A Scalable Full-text Peer-to-Peer Retrieval Engine
  Toan Luu, Fabius Klemm, Ivana Podnar, Martin Rajman, Karl Aberer

15:00 - 15:30 Coffee break

15:30 - 16:30 Panel discussion and workshop closing

General Information

Information Retrieval (IR) in distributed and decentralized environments has become an active field of research during the last years. Recently, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks have emerged as an attractive architectural paradigm for IR. This approach bears the potential to become an alternative to current search engines, both for technical and economic reasons. P2P networks are highly-distributed and self-organizing systems that support resource sharing. For this reasons, they are promising building blocks for next-generation search engines that will have to deal with huge amounts of heterogeneous (e.g. textual, multimedia, Audio/Video, etc.) and continuously changing data. Moreover, P2P search is appealing from an economic perspective since it requires minimal in-place infrastructure and maintenance, yet facilitating higher diversity in contents and search methods. However, P2P retrieval methods still pose a lot of research challenges. Search methods are typically limited to simple keyword queries and the use of advanced retrieval models is quite constrained. Also, there is an ongoing debate on the efficiency and scalability of such approaches, as well as effectiveness and applicability of traditional models in this new environment.

Workshop Activities and Goals

The workshop aims to bring together researchers from the domains of IR and databases working on peer-to-peer information systems and to foster closer collaboration that could have a large impact on future research directions in the area of distributed and P2P IR.

This workshop continues the efforts from previous workshops.

• Workshop on Information Retrieval in Peer-to-Peer Networks 2005
• Workshop on Heterogeneous and Distributed Information Retrieval 2005
• Workshop on Information Retrieval in Peer-to-Peer Networks 2004

Topics

We encourage submissions in the areas of distributed and P2P IR which specifically focus on problems dealing with distribution and decentralization of indexing and search tasks over large-scale networks. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Retrieval models for distributed and P2P IR
• Specific architectures for distributed and P2P IR (e.g. Cluster Computing, Grid Computing, etc.)
• Meta-IR: coping with heterogeneous distributed data
• Resource selection and query routing
• Distributed ranking
• Global metrics in distributed and P2P IR
• Scalability studies
• Efficiency issues in distributed and P2P IR
• Multimedia retrieval for distributed and P2P IR
• Indexing and retrieval of dynamic information sources
• Implemented systems and case studies

Committees

Organizing Committee

Jie Lu, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Raffaele Perego, ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy
Ivana Podnar, EPFL, Switzerland
Fabrizio Silvestri, ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy

Program Committee

• Karl Aberer, EPFL, Switzerland
• Ranieri Baraglia, ISTI - CNR, Pisa, Italy
• Wray Buntine, HIIT, Finland
• Mario Cannataro, University Magna Grecia of Catanzaro, Italy
• Abdur Chowdhury, AOL, USA
• Fabio Crestani, University of Strathclyde, Scotland, UK
• Nassib Nassar, Etymon Inc., USA
• Wolfgang Nejdl, L3S, Hannover, Germany
• Gregory Newby, Arctic Region Supercomputing Center, Alaska
• Salvatore Orlando, University of Venice, Italy
• Iadh Ounis, Glasgow University, UK
• Diego Puppin, ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy
• Fausto Rabitti, ISTI - CNR, Italy
• Martin Rajman, EPFL, Switzerland
• Luo Si, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
• Wolf Siberski, L3S, Hannover, Germany
• Umberto Straccia, ISTI - CNR, Pisa, Italy
• Christos Tryfonopoulos, Technical University of Crete, Greece
• Michalis Vazirgiannis, Athens Univ. of Economics & Business, Greece
• Gerhard Weikum, Max Planck Institut Informatik, Germany
• Pavel Zezula, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
• ChengXiang Zhai, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
• Nivio Ziviani, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil

Workshop Format

The workshop solicits scientific papers that address problems specific to IR in heterogeneous and distributed environments. Additionally, position papers outlining interesting new research domains and approaches are welcome. The selection of papers is based primarily on their potential to influence future research. Papers have to present original contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere.

Paper Submission

Full papers accepted for publication will be included in the proceedings published by ACM. Manuscripts should be formatted using the ACM camera-ready templates. Camera-ready instructions are available here.

Papers should not exceed 8 pages and have to be submitted electronically in printable PDF format (other formats will be rejected) via the online submission system.

At least one author of an accepted paper must register for the workshop. Registration must be done at the time when the author sends the camera-ready copy of the paper.

Important Dates

Ivana Podnar, last update: 2006/11/06