Call for Papers

Personal Information Management:
Now that we're talking, what are we learning?
(PIM 2006)

August 10 & 11, 2006, UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, SEATTLE, USA

Website: http://pim.ischool.washington.edu/pim06

DEADLINE FOR ALL SUBMISSIONS: May 21, 2006

1. Organizers

2. Personal Information Management: PIM 2006

Good research relating to Personal Information Management (PIM) is being done in several disciplines including database management, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence and, certainly, information retrieval. This two-day workshop will continue momentum towards building a community of researchers doing PIM-related research.

3. Workshop Objectives

• Examine where PIM currently stands as a field of inquiry. What should it encompass?
• Determine how to measure progress in the study of PIM and its practice. What does good and better PIM looks like?
• Revisit and add to the list of key problems and challenges identified in the PIM 2005 workshop (http://pim.ischool.washington.edu/pim05home.htm). What progress has been made over the past year and a half?
• Identify promising approaches to PIM (that may meet these challenges).
• Identify specific opportunities for a greater, two-way exchange between researchers focused on PIM and researchers focused on IR. Certainly, IR technologies can assist people who need to find or re-find information to meet a current need. Information filtering technologies may also be usefully applied to assist people with the difficult “keeping” task of deciding where new information should go. Conversely, the analysis of PIM may challenge and inspire modification to standard paradigms of IR inquiry.

4. Submission Information

4.1 Important Dates

4.2 Submission Requirements

Interested participants should submit a 100-word biography, along with a one- to two-thousand-word (2-to-4-page) paper describing their position and relevant work they are doing. (Please use an ACM SIG Proceedings Template available at: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html).

Accepted participants are also expected to provide a simple poster (in PDF) summarizing their PIM-related research. Posters will be printed and posted both days to serve as talking points and conversation starters.  Participants are encouraged to read the report from the 2005 workshop ( http://pim.ischool.washington.edu/pim05home.htm).

Submissions should be emailed to Jacek Gwizdka, pim2006@gwizdka.com, by midnight PST on May 21, 2006. Subject line should begin with “PIM2006”.

See below for more information on workshop theme and topics.

5. Additional Workshop Information

5.1 Workshop Theme

Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to both the practice and the study of the activities a person performs in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, use and distribute the information needed to complete tasks (work-related and not) and to fulfill various roles and responsibilities (as parent, employee, friend, member of community, etc.).

There is a critical need to continue momentum towards building a community of researchers doing PIM-related research. As an important first step in this process, thirty leading researchers from various disciplines convened in Seattle, WA on January 27-29, 2005 for a workshop on PIM sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) (see the final workshop report at http://pim.ischool.washington.edu/).

Participants identified the potential for PIM to promote a synergistic multi-disciplinary dialog. Another sentiment expressed was that research problems relating to PIM often “fell through the cracks” between existing R&D efforts.

The workshop led to a special issue on PIM in the Communications of the ACM (January, 2006 issue). Participants also expressed an interest in re-convening periodically and in connection with other conferences such as SIGIR, SIGCHI and ASIST (http://www.asist.org) – each of which attracts a substantial subset of people doing PIM-related research.

The upcoming SIGIR 2006 conference in Seattle represents an excellent opportunity to continue the momentum begun by the original workshop and also to engage a larger community of people involved in information retrieval research that relates directly to PIM.

5.2 Workshop Topics

We encourage participation based on, but not limited to, the following PIM-related topics:

• How Do People Find and Re-Find Information?
• How Do People Keep Information for Later Use?
• How Do People Organize?
• Methods and Methodologies of PIM Fieldwork

Tools & Techniques in Support of PIM

• Tools for Searching Personal Information
• Tools for Structuring Personal Information
• Underlying Data Representation and the Unification of Personal Information
• Email and PIM
• Teachable/learnable Strategies of PIM
• Methods and Methodologies for the Evaluation of PIM

PIM in the Larger World

• PIM and Other People
• Privacy and Projection of Personal Information
• Security, Law and Policies (Public and Corporate)
• PIM for Different People and Situations
• Patient PIM
• PIM for an Aging Population
• Individual Differences