ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)

Call for submissions to a Special Issue on Search, Mining and their Applications on Mobile Devices

Submission deadline: June 24, 2016

 

Motivation

In recent years, mobile devices have become the most popular interface for users to retrieve and access information: recent reports show users spend significantly more time and issue more search queries on mobile devices than on desktops in the United States. The accelerated growth of mobile usage brings unique opportunities to the information retrieval and data mining research communities. 

Mobile devices capture several rich contextual and personal signals that can be leveraged to accurately predict users’ intents for serving more relevant content, and even provide novel zero-query recommendations proactively. Google Now and Microsoft Cortana are two recent examples of such emerging systems. Furthermore, mobile devices constantly generate a huge amount of sensor footprints (e.g., GPS, motion sensors) and user activity data (e.g., used apps) that are often missing from their desktop counterparts. These new sources of implicit and explicit user feedback are valuable for discovering actionable knowledge, and designing better systems that serve each individual the right content at the right time and location. In addition, by aggregating mobile interactions across individuals one can infer interesting conclusions beyond search and recommendation. Generating real-time traffic estimates is one example of such applications.

This special issue focuses on research problems of search, mining and their applications in mobile devices. Topics of interest include but are not limited to mobile data mining and management, mobile search, personalization and recommendation, mobile user interfaces and human-computer interaction, and new applications in mobile environment. The aim of this multidisciplinary special issue is to bring together top experts across multiple disciplines, including information retrieval, data mining, mobile computing, and cyber-physical systems, such that academia and industrial researchers can exchange ideas and share the latest developments on the state-of-the-art and practice of mobile search and mobile data mining.

Scope & topics of interest

This special issue aims to present the latest advances in mining and search technologies, and their applications. Topics of interest for this issue include but are not limited to:

• •    Mobile search 
  • •  New search and ranking algorithms, such as ranking with mobile versions of websites, and location/context-aware search.
  • •  New interaction models for search, such as speech-driven and conversational systems.
  • •  Emerging search verticals, such as search apps, and search personal stuff (contacts, emails, documents in clouds).
  • •  Mobile friendly search result presentation, such as generating direct answer card and integrating search results from different verticals.
  • •  Other search techniques, such as new evaluation metrics design, search over voices or images, user interface, and real-time search.
• •    Mobile mining 
  • •  Mobile usage understanding, such as mining user usage patterns, and understanding differences in user behavior between desktop and mobile.
  • •  Mining large scale sensor data, such as mining GPS data to find trajectories, and mining motion sensor data to recognize user activities.
  • •  Mining heterogeneous data, such as mining text and location data, and spatial and temporal data.
  • •  User modeling and targeting, such as user behavior profiling and purchase prediction.
• •    New applications and their studies in mobile environment 
  • •  New interaction models and applications, such as proactive and zero-query search.
  • •  Recommendations in mobile, such as dynamic apps recommendation.
  • •  Understanding and protecting privacy, such as automatic privacy permissions recommendations.
  • •  Other new applications and their studies, such as activity tracking, and user localizations and navigations.

All accepted manuscripts are expected to make a significant scientific contribution and present a rigorous evaluation of the methods they present.

Submission

For submission instructions and reviewing procedure, please refer to http://tois.acm.org/authors.cfm and add a comment in the email to the Assistant to the Editor-In-Chief that the submission is intended for the special issue on Search, Mining and their Applications on Mobile Devices. All papers will be reviewed by three external reviewers plus at least one guest editor.

Important Dates

• •    Paper submissions deadline: June 24, 2016 
• •    Initial reviewer feedback:  September 23, 2016 
• •    Revised submissions due: November 18, 2016
• •    Final notification to authors due: January 27, 2017
• •    Camera-ready articles due: February 17, 2017

Guest Editors

• •    Hongning Wang, University of Virginia, USA
• •    Rui Li, Google, USA
• •    Milad Shokouhi, Microsoft, USA
• •    Hang Li, Noah's Ark Lab of Huawei Technologies, China
• •    Yi Chang, Yahoo Research, USA