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        Special Track on: INFORMATION ACCESS AND RETRIEVAL
               http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/SAC2004/

          2004 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2004)  
                March 14-17, 2003, Nicosia, Cyprus
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Over the past eighteen years, the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
(SAC) has become a primary forum for applied computer scientists and
application developers from around the world to interact and present
their work. SAC 2004 is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on
Applied Computing (SIGAPP): its proceedings are published by ACM in
both printed form and CD-ROM; they are also available on the web
through ACM's Digital Library. Visit the SAC 2004 home page for
further information: http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2004/
        

SPECIAL TRACK ON INFORMATION ACCESS AND RETRIEVAL (SAC-IAR)

Nowadays, one of the most important and challenging problems in
computer science is the definition of effective technologies, which
support access to information. With the expansion of the Internet
effective tools for finding relevant information are urgently
needed. This special track will be concerned with theory and, in
particular, applications of novel approaches to information access and
retrieval. The track has been successfully running within SAC since
2002.

Major topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

- models of information access and retrieval
- applications of advanced information access and retrieval systems 
- multimedia and multimodal information access and retrieval 
- content-based information filtering 
- collaborative filtering 
- search engines 
- distributed information access and retrieval 
- information and data fusion 
- interfaces for information access 
- user modelling 
- trials and best practice in information access and retrieval 


Track Program Chairs:   

- Fabio Crestani, Department of Computer and Information Sciences,
  University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, UK,
  f.crestani@cis.strath.ac.uk

- Gabriella Pasi, National Council of Research (ITC-CNR), Milano,
  Italy 
  gabriella.pasi@itc.cnr.it


Guidelines for Submission
 
Original papers from the above-mentioned or other related areas will
be considered.  This includes three categories of submissions: 1)
original and unpublished research; 2) reports of innovative computing
applications in the arts, sciences, engineering, business, government,
education and industry; and 3) reports of successful technology
transfer to new problem domains. Each submitted paper will be fully
refereed and undergo a blind review process by at least three
referees. The accepted papers in all categories will be published in
the ACM SAC 2004 proceedings.

Submission guidelines must be strictly followed:
 
Submit your paper electronically in either PDF or PS format to:
sac-iar@cis.strath.ac.uk. Submissions should be printable on a
standard printer on common paper formats, such as US letter and A4.
 
The author(s) name(s) and address(es) must not appear in the body of
the paper, and self-reference should be in the third person. This is
to facilitate blind review. The body of the paper should not exceed
5,000 words (approximately 15 pages, double-spaced).  Authors should
include in the email message of the submission the author(s) name(s)
and affiliation(s), and the contact address (including e-mail,
telephone, and fax).
 
For more information see http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/SAC2004/

 
Important dates:

September 6, 2003       Paper Submission
October 18,  2003       Author Notification
November 8,  2003       Camera-Ready Copy
March 14-17, 2004       SAC 2004 takes place