CALL FOR PAPERS
Fourth International Workshop on
Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web
(http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/2008/)

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IMPORTANT DATES

22/Feb/2008 : Deadline for research articles
31/March/2008 : Deadline for challenge submissions
22/April/2008 : Workshop at the WWW 2008 conference in Beijing, China
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Contents:

1. AIRWeb'08 Topics
2. Web Spam Challenge
3. Timeline
4. Organizers and Program Committee

1. AIRWEB'08 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/2008/)

2. WEB SPAM CHALLENGE

Last year we introduced a novel element at the workshop: a Web Spam
Challenge for testing web spam detection systems. We will be holding
the Web Spam Challenge again this year, using the WEBSPAM-UK2007
collection for Web Spam Detection (http://www.yr-bcn.es/webspam),
which we anticipate being released in early January, 2008.

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 2008
workshop.

For more information, see (http://webspam.lip6.fr/)

3. TIMELINE

- 15 February 2008: E-mail intention to submit a workshop paper
(optional, but helpful)
- 22 February 2008: Deadline for workshop paper submissions
- 14 March 2008: Notification of acceptance of workshop papers
- 31 March 2008: Camera-ready copy due
- 31 March 2008: Challenge submissions due
- 22 April 2008: Date of workshop

4. ORGANIZERS AND PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Organizers

- Carlos Castillo, Yahoo! Research
- Kumar Chellapilla, Microsoft Live Labs
- Dennis Fetterly, Microsoft Research

Program Committee

- Einat Amitay, IBM
- András Benczúr, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
- Paul-Alexandru Chiri, Uni Hannover
- James Caverlee, Texas A&M University
- Gordon Cormack, University of Waterloo
- Nick Craswell, Microsoft Research
- Matt Cutts, Google
- Brian Davison, Lehigh University
- Ludovic Denoyer, University Paris 6
- Aaron D'Souza, Google
- Edel Garcia, Mi Islita.com
- Natalie Glance, Nielsen BuzzMetrics
- Antonio Gulli, Ask.com
- Zoltán Gyöngyi, Stanford University
- Monika Henzinger, Google
- Pranam Kolari, Yahoo! Applied Research
- Mark Manasse, Microsoft Research
- Marc Najork, Microsoft Research
- Alexandros Ntoulas, Microsoft Search Labs
- Jan Pedersen, Yahoo! Search
- Erik Selberg, Amazon
- Torsten Suel, Polytechnic University
- Mike Thelwall, University of Wolverhampton
- Baoning Wu, Snap
- Tao Yang, Ask.com