CFP: Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web

[Apologies if you receive multiple copies]

                        CALL FOR PAPERS  
                Third International Workshop on 
           Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web
             <http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/2007/>
                      
                             -and-
                      
                 CALL FOR CHALLENGE SUBMISSIONS  
             Track I of the Web Spam Challenge 2007
                   <http://webspam.lip6.fr/>

=========================================================================
                       IMPORTANT DATES

    15/Feb/2007 : Deadline for research articles
    30/Mar/2007 : Deadline for challenge submissions
     8/May/2007 : Workshop at the WWW 2007 conference in Banff, Canada
=========================================================================

Contents:

    1. AIRWeb'07 Topics
    2. Web Spam Challenge
    3. Timeline
    4. Organizers and Program Committee

1. AIRWEB'07 TOPICS

Adversarial Information Retrieval addresses tasks such as gathering,
indexing, filtering, retrieving and ranking information from collections
wherein a subset has been manipulated maliciously.  On the Web, the
predominant form of such manipulation is "search engine spamming" or
spamdexing, i.e., malicious attempts to influence the outcome of ranking
algorithms, aimed at getting an undeserved high ranking for some items
in the collection.

We solicit both full and short papers on any aspect of adversarial
information retrieval on the Web. Particular areas of interest include,
but are not limited to: 

   * Link spam
   * Content spam
   * Cloaking
   * Comment spam
   * Spam-oriented blogging
   * Click fraud detection
   * Reverse engineering of ranking algorithms
   * Web content filtering
   * Advertisement blocking
   * Stealth crawling
   * Malicious tagging

Proceedings of the workshop will be included in the ACM Digital Library.
Full papers are limited to 8 pages; work-in progress will be permitted 4
pages.

For more information, see <http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/2007/>

2. WEB SPAM CHALLENGE

This year, we are introducing a novel element: a Web Spam Challenge for
testing web spam detection systems. We will be using the WEBSPAM-UK2006
collection for Web Spam Detection <http://www.yr-bcn.es/webspam>.

The collection includes large set of web pages, a web graph, and
human-provided labels for a set of hosts. We will also provide a set of
features extracted from the contents and links in the collection, which
may be used by the participant teams in addition to any automatic
technique they choose to use. 

We ask that participants of the Web Spam Challenge submit predictions
(normal/spam) for all unlabeled hosts in the collection. Predictions
will be evaluated and results will be announced at the AIRWeb 2007
workshop.

For more information, see <http://webspam.lip6.fr/>

3. TIMELINE

   - 7 February 2007: E-mail intention to submit a workshop paper
                      (optional, but helpful)
   - 15 February 2007: Deadline for workshop paper submissions
   - 15 March 2007: Notification of acceptance of workshop papers
   - 30 March 2007: Camera-ready copy due
   - 30 March 2007: Challenge submissions due
   - 8 May 2007: Date of workshop

4. ORGANIZERS AND PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Organizers

   - Carlos Castillo, Yahoo! Research
   - Kumar Chellapilla, Microsoft Live Labs
   - Brian D. Davison, Lehigh University

Program Committee

   - Einat Amitay, IBM Research
   - Andras Benczur, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
   - Andrei Broder, Yahoo! Research
   - Soumen Chakrabarti, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
   - Paul-Alexandru Chirita, University of Hannover
   - Tim Converse, Yahoo!
   - Nick Craswell, Microsoft Research
   - Matt Cutts, Google
   - Ludovic Denoyer, University Paris 6
   - Aaron D'Souza, Google
   - Dennis Fetterly, Microsoft Research
   - Tim Finin, University of Maryland
   - Edel Garcia, Mi Islita.com
   - Natalie Glance, Nielsen BuzzMetrics
   - Antonio Gulli, Ask.com
   - Zoltan Gyongyi, Stanford University
   - Monika Henzinger, Google & Ecole Polytechnique Federale de
Lausanne (EFPL)
   - Jeremy Hylton, Google
   - Ronny Lempel, IBM Research
   - Mark Manasse, Microsoft Research
   - Gilad Mishne, University of Amsterdam
   - Marc Najork, Microsoft Research
   - Jan Pedersen, Yahoo!
   - Tamas Sarlos, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
   - Erik Selberg, Microsoft Search Labs
   - Mike Thelwall, University of Wolverhampton
   - Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo! Research
   - Matt Wells, Gigablast
   - Baoning Wu, Lehigh University
   - Tao Yang, Ask.com