The impact of Big Data and large-scale data infrastructures is now visible in science, business, government and civil society. Companies store more data than anyone could imagine just a few years back, and the proliferation of open linked data has made it possible to share well-defined data across organizational and geographical boundaries. Big data and data analytics are rapidly expanding research areas that are of great importance to both industry and academia. The focus is on scalable techniques for intelligent data production, collection, classification, storing, integration, analysis and visualization. Big Data is multi-disciplinary of nature and is closely linked to industrial innovation and value creation.

Norwegian Big Data Symposium (NOBIDS 2018) focuses on Big Data applications and Big Data research from all disciplines. This year NOBIDS has a special focus on news automation and interactivity. News automation, in other words automated reporting of news or robot journalism, seen as a great help for journalists by some people while others think that it will replace journalists. While the debate goes on the technological advancements within the domain continues to excite the computer scientists and makes the journalists to prepare for the future of journalism. News automation deals with big amounts of news data in order to create individual stories automatically. Interactivity focuses on the human computer interaction in the context of big data and robot journalism. Automatic generation of personalized news, chatbots and, any user feedback and interactivity based systems are of interest in this context. NOBIDS 2018 aims to bring researchers and industry practitioners together to exchange ideas, establish collaborations and share experiences within the special theme of news automation and interactivity.

NOBIDS 2018 will be held in conjunction with the NxtMedia Conference in Trondheim.

Topics of interests for the research track of NOBIDS 2018 include but are not limited to:

- News automation / robot journalism
- Conversational systems and chatbots
- News summarization, classification and sentiment analysis
- Fake news detection
- Scalable AI/machine learning
- Industrial applications of big data and data analytics
- Big data management and life cycle support
- Big data architectures
- New programming models and platforms for big data computing
- Cloud/grid/stream computing for big data
- Big data on mobile platforms
- Large-scale semantics and open linked data
- Scalable natural language processing
- Recommender systems and personalization
- Detection of trusted news sources
- News analytics
- User experience and visualization of big data
- User intelligence and user profiling
- Social media systems
- Anonymization, privacy and security
- Business models for big data
- Legal aspects of open and protected data
- Evaluation and benchmarking of big data applications