Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Beginning in Beijing

- Opened a Chinese bank account
- Bought mobile phones
- Bought subway cards
- Visited Microsoft and gave documents for my work permit application
(Special thanks to Fei and Ella for their help!)
- Bought food at a department store
- Took my daughter to the playground/playroom

I've been told I will have to visit PSB. Pet Shop Boys? Yes, I like their latest album (called Yes). Great music and great production, though the lyrics may be less interesting than usual.

Huh? Public Security Bureau?

Sunday, April 26, 2009

No income, one kid

新宿のホテルで娘のパンティを3枚洗ったあとに書いている。
(大丈夫、手は洗ったのでこのブログはきれいです。)

無収入の3-4月の間にやった主な雑用:
・国民年金加入(3月~)@社会保険事務所+海外任意加入(5月~)@区役所
・健康保険任意継続手続(3~4月)@健康保険組合
・車売却(家は昨年売却済)
・JAFの休会届
・賃貸マンション退去手続き
中国就労ビザ取得のための手続き(2~4月)
・引越し作業(これに伴うCD+DVD+本などの破棄、身辺整理)
・転出届@区役所
・6月以降の住民税口座引き落とし手続き@区役所
(なお今年度分の確定申告は会社の手配した業者が代行してくれる)
・電気・ガス・水道・電話(固定+携帯)停止
(携帯電話の解約金は高すぎ。帰国したら別のキャリアにしよう)
・インタネットプロバイダの契約変更(メイルアドレスのみ継続使用)
・郵便物転送手続@郵便局
・もろもろの住所変更手続き(学会、クレジットカード等)
・北京の住居選定+契約交渉
・北京における娘の学校選定、入学金支払
・日本円トラベラーズチェック・人民元購入

All work and no play makes Tetsuya a dull boy.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

SIGIR best paper committee

I've joined the committee for selecting the best (student) paper for SIGIR 2009. We have eleven candidate papers. I did this last year too.

The full paper acceptance rate for this year is 16%, the toughest ever. Even though the target acceptance rate these days is 20%, reviewers expect a lot from a SIGIR submission.

Got my Chinese visa at last!

It's been a long and winding road, starting with my medical exam.

The relocation company came and took everything away today, but I cannot apply for an import permit until I have both a work permit and a residence permit. So all my boxes will stay in Japan until mid May.

It's not over yet.

An incident from "Guanxi - Microsoft, China and Bill Gates' Plan to Win the Road Ahead"

 MSNサーチグループに移転されるまえに、陳正のクラスタリング技術は二○○四年のSIGIRの論文のテーマとして取り上げられた。会議は映画『フル・モンティ』を世に出したことで知られる荒々しい鉄鋼の町、イギリスのシェフィールドで開催された。<中略>
 会議のあと、北京の一行はロンドンを発つ前に、マイクロソフトのケンブリッジの研究所を訪問しようと、列車に乗ることにした。<中略>ほんの数分後に維英の叫び声が聞こえてきた。『列車をまちがえてる!』」
ロバート・ブーデリ&グレゴリー・T・フアン著 依田卓巳訳:
ビル・ゲイツ、北京に立つ 天才科学者たちの最先端テクノロジー競争,
日本経済新聞出版社, 2007, p.263


Yes I remember! Right after SIGIR 2004 held in Sheffield, Wei-Ying Ma and others took the wrong train and ended up in Bristol. I took the right train on the same day, and gave a talk at MSR Cambridge.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Deadline extended: AIRS 2009

#####################################################################
PAPER SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO APRIL 26:
The Fifth Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS 2009)
http://www-kb.ist.hokudai.ac.jp/AIRS2009/
October 21-23, 2009 at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan.

In cooperation with ACM SIGIR
#####################################################################

The Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS) aims to bring
together researchers and developers to exchange new ideas and latest
achievements in the field of information retrieval (IR). The scope of
the symposium covers applications, systems, technologies and theory
aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video and
multimedia data. The Fifth AIRS (AIRS 2009) welcomes submissions of
original papers in the broad field of information retrieval.
Technical issues covered include, but are not limited to:

IR Theory and Formal Models;
IR Evaluation, Test collections, Evaluation methods and metrics,
Experimental design, Data collection and analysis;
Interactive IR, User interfaces and visualization, User studies,
User models, Task-based IR, User/Task-based IR theory;
Web IR, Intranet/enterprise search, Citation and link analysis,
Adversarial IR;
Distributed IR, Fusion/Combination, Digital libraries;
Cross-language retrieval, Multilingual retrieval, Machine
translation for IR;
Video and image retrieval, Audio and speech retrieval,
Music retrieval;
Topic detection and tracking, Routing, Content-based filtering,
Collaborative filtering, Agents, Spam filtering;
Question answering, Information extraction, Summarization, Lexical
acquisition, NLP for IR;
Text Data Mining and Machine Learning for IR.

Accepted papers will be published as part of the LNCS series from
Springer, and will be EI-indexed. The AIRS 2009 organisers are also
planning on a post-conference special issue in a renowned
international journal, and the authors of the best papers at AIRS
2009 will be encouraged to contribute to this issue.


IMPORTANT DATES

April 26, 2009 Submissions due (NEW DEADLINE)
June 1, 2009 Notification of acceptance
June 16, 2009 Camera-ready due
September 1, 2009 Registration deadline
October 21-23 2009 AIRS 2009


SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

The AIRS 2009 proceedings will be published as LNCS,
so please follow the default author instructions available at
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-7-72376-0

In addition, please "anonymise" your paper to facilitate blind
reviewing, and make sure your paper is no longer than 12 pages in
the LNCS format. Submissions that do not follow these guidelines
will be rejected unconditionally. Duplicate submissions (the same
paper being submitted to AIRS 2009 and to another conference
at the same time), if detected, will also be rejected. Please
upload your paper to the START submission system at
https://www.softconf.com/s08/AIRS2009/
by April 19, 2009. The Program Committee will carefully review it
and decide whether it should be accepted (either as a 12-page
paper or as a 6-page poster) or not.

Once your paper gets accepted, you will be asked to send us a
signed copyright form available at the above Springer website.
At least one author per paper must present the work at the
conference. For updates, please visit the AIRS 2009 website.


SPONSORSHIP OPPORTUNITIES:

Please visit
http://www-kb.ist.hokudai.ac.jp/AIRS2009/sponsorship.html .


ORGANIZATION

Honorary Conference Chair: Elizabeth Liddy (Syracuse University)

Conference Co-Chairs: Masaharu Yoshioka (Hokkaido University) and
Tetsuya Sakai (Microsoft Research Asia)

Publication Co-Chairs: Akiko Aizawa (NII) and Kazuko Kuriyama
(Shirayuri College)

Publicity Co-Chairs: Atsushi Fujii (University of Tsukuba),
Ian Soboroff (NIST), Dawei Song (Robert Gordon University) and
William Webber (University of Melbourne)

Finance Chair: Takuya Kida (Hokkaido University)

Program Committee Co-Chairs: Chin-Yew Lin (Microsoft Research
Asia), Gary Geunbae Lee (POSTECH) and Dawei Song (Robert Gordon
University)

Area Chairs:

Information Retrieval Models and Theories
- Tien-Yan Liu (Microsoft Research Asia)
- David Losada (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela)

Interactive Information Retrieval
-Ian Ruthven (University of Strathclyde)

Search
- Andrew Turpin (RMIT)
- Min Zhang (Tsinghua University)

QA, Summarization and IE
- Teruko Mitamura (CMU)

Multimedia Retrieval
- Gareth Jones (Dublin City University)

If you have any questions, please contact the conference co-chairs:
yoshioka
at
ist.hokudai.ac.jp and
tetsuyasakai
at
acm.org

On the Robustness of Information Retrieval Metrics to Biased Relevance Assessments

Sakai. T.:
On the Robustness of Information Retrieval Metrics to Biased Relevance Assessments,
Journal of Information Processing, pp.156-166, 2009. pdf
Also available in IPSJ Journal, Vol.50, No.4, pp.1410-1420, 2009.

- This is my SIGIR 2008 poster plus CIKM 2008 paper plus a little bug fix.

Kyoto - more cherryblossoms





Monday, April 13, 2009

Selecting Yamashita SIG Research Award candidates

FI研からの平成21年度山下記念研究賞の推薦論文選定作業に着手。
歴代のFI研からの受賞者を調べてみると:

神門 典子 構成要素カテゴリを用いた原著論文の内部構造分析(92-FI-25)
林  泰樹 企業データの分析とデータ管理-実施例に基づく報告-(FIシンポ95)
中渡瀬秀一 統計的手法によるテキストからの重要語抽出メカニズム(95-FI-39)
木本 晴夫 日本語情報検索システム評価用テストコレクションの構築(FIシンポ98)
栗山 和子 大規模テストコレクション構築のためのプーリ ングについて:NTCIR-1の予備テストの分析(99-FI-54)
黒橋 禎夫 入力質問と知識ベースとの柔軟なマッチングに基づく対話的ヘルプシステム(情報学シンポ2001)
今村 誠 素性論理に基づくXML文書ルール記述言語DRDL(2004-FI-74)
賀沢 秀人 最大マージン原理にもとづく多重トピック文書の自動分類(2004-FI-76)
酒井 哲也 A Further Note on Evaluation Metrics for the Task of Finding One Highly Relevant Document(2006-FI-82)
相澤 彰子 類語関係抽出タスクにおけるコーパス規模拡大の影響(2006-FI-84)
吉田 慶章 オントロジーを用いたニュース理解支援方式(2008-FI-90)

ううむ、「おっさん」が多いな。(なお、同一研究会からの二度の受賞は不可。)SIGIRのbest student paper awardにならって、若手向けのFI研独自の賞を新設したほうがよいかも知れない。つまり、山下賞推薦論文が「おっさん」論文だった場合のみ、若手の受賞論文を別途選定する。

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Now that I'm chair of IPSJ SIGFI

IPSJ: Information Processing Society of Japan
SIGFI: Special Interest Group on Fundamental Informatics

情報処理学会情報学基礎研究会(FI研)の主査に就任した。今年度も例年通り4回の他研究会との合同研究発表会を開催予定(7,11,1,3月)。また、国際会議AIRS 2009(10/21-23)の併設ワークショップという形で、FI研主催イベント「情報アクセスシンポジウム2009」を10/20に開催予定。会場はAIRSと同じ北海道大学(札幌)。

近い将来、研究会の名称も変えたいと考えている。

ACLIA-2@NTCIR-8 website

I'm one of the coordinators of the IR4QA (Information Retrieval for Question Answering) Task of the ACLIA (Advanced Cross-lingual Information Access) Task Cluster. The website is here. We are supposed to release the Call for Participation in May.

One of my SIGIR posters got in

I submitted two posters to SIGIR 2009. One of them got rejected, but the other one got in:

Title: Serendipitous Search via Wikipedia: A Query Log Analysis
Authors: Tetsuya Sakai, Kenichi Nogami

Both were about KotobaNoUchu.

The SIGIR poster is becoming more and more competitive. Last year, the acceptance rate was 91/173=53%; This year, it's 86/256=34%.

Monday, April 6, 2009

Friday, April 3, 2009

SIGIR 2009 online PC meeting is over

Well, almost.
Many "learning to rank" papers have been accepted.
Only one paper on mobile IR. Pity.

Thursday, April 2, 2009