ICSC 2007

Greetings from the Technical

Program Committee Chairs

On behalf of the Technical Program Committee, it is our pleasure to invite you to an exciting technical program offered by the First IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC2007.) The technical program of ICSC2007 consists of technical paper presentation sessions, expert panel discussions, workshop sessions, and keynote speeches addressing emerging technologies and latest research and development results in all areas of semantic computing.

ICSC2007 is an international forum for researchers to exchange information regarding advances in the state-of-the-art and practice of semantic computing, as well as to identify the emerging research topics and define the future of semantic computing.

This year’s ICSC is honored to have several of the world’s leading experts and distinguished speakers to join us and to share with us their wisdom and their vision of the future. The technical program starts on the morning of Monday, September 17th, 2007, with an opening keynote speech on ‘A new frontier in computation: computation with information described in natural language’ by Professor Lotfi A. Zadeh, Professor and Director of BISC, University of California, Berkeley. Immediately after the opening keynote, a plenary distinguished expert panel on “Semantic computing: issues, challenges, and future research directions” will take us into an exhilarating conference featuring 21 technical sessions. The second keynote of the conference by Dr. Raymond Paul, Technical Director for Command and Control (c2) Policy, US Department of Defense is arranged in the afternoon of Monday, September 17th. On Tuesday, September 18th, 2007, a keynote titled ‘Towards discourse meaning’ by Professor Arvind Joshi, Henry Salvatori Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania will lead us into the second day of the conference. Following the keynote is our second distinguished expert panel on ‘Bridging the multimedia “semantic gap”.’ The afternoon program begins with our fourth keynote on ‘How what people are doing helps identify who they should be interacting with and how: Driving rich user communication experiences through context awareness and social software’ by Dr. Doree Duncan Seligmann, Director of Collaborative Applications Research, Avaya Labs. The banquet keynotes by Prof. C. V. Ramamoorthy, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley and Dr. Waqar Hasan, VP of Engineering at Yahoo, along with the announcement of the winners of several distinguished awards will highlight the evening event. A third morning keynote titled ‘Semantics in experiential computing’ by Professor Ramesh Jain, Bren Professor in Information & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine is scheduled on the third day of the conference. Those seven conference keynotes along with two ICSC distinguished expert panels are simply "not to be missed" events that promise to be both enlightening and informative.

The technical program of ICSC2007 would not have been possible without the tremendous volunteer efforts of the entire ICSC2007 technical program committee and organization committee teams. We are most grateful to the authors who submitted their work to ICSC2007, the 70+ technical program committee members and the reviewers who have so diligently supported the peer review process, and especially the technical track chairs, Alberto Del Bimbo, Pei Cao, Radu Florian, Richard Goodwin, Rodrigo C. Guido, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Alex Hauptmann, Dimitris Kanellopoulos, Zhu Li, Craig Martell, Martha Palmer, Jaideep Srivastava, and Ning Zhong, the Workshop Co-Chairs Shu-Ching Chen, Gerald Friedland, Mengchi Liu, and Zhiyong Peng, the Special Session Co-Chairs Ramazan Savas Aygun, Enhong Chen, Ivan Lee, Mei-Ling Shyu, and Bin Wei, the Panel Co-Chairs Hanwen Hsiao, John Kender, and Ilja Radusch, the Best Paper Award Committee Chairs Zhu Liu and Iryna Gurevych and the Award committee, the Publication Co-Chairs Tao Wu and Weide Chang who have devoted their time and effort to organize an excellent technical program. A very special thank goes to our conference Technical Program Coordination Co-Chairs Gerald Friedland and Xiao-Ping Zhang, our Financial and Local Arrangement Chair George Wang, and our Registration Chair Shu Wang for their time, dedication, and hard work. The ICSC2007 technical program would not have been possible without their endless effort. We’d like to use this opportunity to thank all those who helped to put together this remarkable program and also to encourage and welcome everyone to attend ICSC2007 where we can take advantage of all these wonderful work to learn about the latest research results, key findings, and emerging semantic computing technologies, to see old friends and meet new friends, and to discuss the most exciting ideas.

We look forward to seeing you at ICSC2007!

Sincerely,

Heather Yu, Milind Naphade, and Hasida Koiti

Technical Program Co-chairs