2nd Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval (RuSSIR 2008)
Monday September 1 – Friday September 5, 2008
Taganrog, Russia

CALL FOR COURSE PROPOSALS

The second Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval will be held
September 1–5, 2008 in Taganrog, Russia. The school is co-organized by
the Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar (ROMIP,
http://romip.ru/) and Taganrog Institute of Technology
(http://www.tsure.ru/). The first RuSSIR took place in Ekaterinburg,
Russia in September 2007 (see http://romip.ru/russir2007/) and was a
big success.

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 make
students familiar with 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. RuSSIR2008 will offer 4 or 5 one-week
courses and host approximately 100 participants. The working languages
of the school are Russian and English.

The city of Taganrog was founded by Peter the Great in 1698 as a
fortress on the Sea of Azov near the mouth of the Don River. The
population of modern Taganrog is about three hundred thousand.
Taganrog is well known as the birthplace of the prominent Russian
writer Anton Chekhov. Closeness to the sea, fresh air and a lot of
sunshine provide excellent conditions for living, working and
recreation. Taganrog Technological Institute of Southern Federal
University (TTI SFU) is one of the leading engineering training
facilities in Russia. It was established in 1952. Nowadays its total
enrollment is more than 11 000 students. The Institute joins about 650
faculty members. The International Airport in the regional center
Rostov-on-Don is only 80 kilometers from TTI SFU campus.

The RuSSIR2008 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. A course proposal must contain a brief
description of the course (up to 200 words), preferred schedule,
prerequisites, equipment needs, as well as a short description of
teaching/research experience and contact information of the lecturer.

RuSSIR2008 organizers will cover travel expenses and accommodation
during the school. Lecturers are not paid for their contribution.
Details of reimbursement will be negotiated with each lecturer
individually. The RuSSIR organizers will highly appreciate if,
whenever it is possible, lecturers could find alternative funding to
cover travel and accommodation expenses and indicate this possibility
in the proposal.

Anyone interested in lecturing at RuSSIR2008 is encouraged to submit
proposal by email to Pavel Braslavski (pb@yandex-team.ru), by 31
January 2008. All submitters will be notified by February 20, 2008
about selection results.