Track: Digital Media: Content and Communication
Minitrack: Information Access and Retrieval: The Web, Users, and --------------- HCI

Information Retrieval supports the computerized search of large document and digital media collections (millions or billions of items) to select small subsets of those documents relevant to a user's information need. Such algorithms are the basis for internet search engines and question-answering systems.

This minitrack examines the reality of information access in the context of the Web. It addresses the essential question of how to help the user access and make use of digital data. Our goal is to bring together the common threads of research in this area and to provide a forum for researchers in which emerging topics can be fostered.

Topics and research areas (both theoretical and application issues) include, but are not limited to:
* Information Retrieval Language Models, Algorithms and Tools
* Fact-based Open-domain Question Answering
* Web-based Information Retrieval
* Topic Detection and Tracking over time
* Geographic Information Retrieval, gazeteers
* Information Visualization
* Text Categorization and Summarization
* Cross Language Retrieval
* Image and Video Retrieval

Co-chairs:
Ray Larson (Primary Contact)
School of Information
University of California, Berkeley
102 South Hall #4600, Berkeley, California 94720-4600, USA
Phone: +1-510-642-6046
Fax: +1-510-642-5814
Email: ray@ischool.berkeley.edu

Carolyn Watters
Faculty of Computer Science
Dalhousie University
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 3W5
Phone: +1-902-494-6723
Email: carolyn.watters@dal.ca

Amanda Spink
School of Information Systems
Faculty of Information Technology
Queensland University of Technology
126 Margaret Street GPO Box 2434, Brisbane QLD 4001 Australia
Phone: +61-7-3138-9583
Email: ah.spink@qut.edu.au