MULTILINGUAL WORLD RuSSIR 2012 Monday August 6 - Friday August 10, 2012 Yaroslavl, Russia http://romip.ru/russir2012 CALL FOR COURSE PROPOSALS The 6th Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval (RuSSIR 2012) will be held on August 6-10, 2012 in Yaroslavl, Russia. The school is co-organized by the Yaroslavl Demidov State University (http://www.uniyar.ac.ru) and the Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar (ROMIP, http://romip.ru). The mission of the RuSSIR school series is to teach students about modern problems and methods in information retrieval and related disciplines, to stimulate scientific research and collaboration in the field; and to create environment for informal contacts between scientists, students and industry professionals. RuSSIR 2012 will offer up to seven courses and host approximately 150 participants. The target audience of the school is advanced graduate and PhD students, post-doctoral researchers, academic and industrial researchers, and developers. The working language of the school is English. RuSSIR 2012 will focus on multilingual information access, cross- language information retrieval, and machine translation. The School Program Committee invites proposals for courses on a wide range of IR- related topics. Courses dealing with multilinguality, spanning IR, NLP, and MT domains, and dealing with interdisciplinary problems are encouraged. Each course should consist of five 90-minute-long sessions (normally in five consecutive days). The course may include both lectures and practical exercises. Summer school organizers will cover travel expenses and accommodation for one lecturer per course; no additional honorarium will be paid to lecturer(s). The school organizers would highly appreciate if, whenever possible, lecturers could find alternative funding to cover the travel and accommodation expenses, and indicate this possibility in their proposals. Course proposals must be submitted in PDF format to the submission web site http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=russir2012, by January 20, 2012. A course proposal should contain the following: - Title and keywords - Description of teaching and research experience, and contact information of the lecturer(s) - Relevance of the course to the school's scope and objectives - Brief description of the course (up to 300 words suitable for inclusion in school materials) - Full description (1-2 pages - to be used for evaluation) - Target audience and expected prerequisite knowledge of the audience - Relevant references to support proposal evaluation - Preferred schedule and necessary equipment All proposals will be evaluated by the program committee according to the school's goals, the clarity of presentation, and the lecturers’ qualifications and experience. All applicants will be notified of the committee's decision by February 19, 2012. Early informal inquiries about the school or the proposal evaluation process are encouraged. About RuSSIR: RuSSIR series started in 2007 and has developed into a renowned academic event with solid international participation. Previous schools took place in Ekaterinburg, Taganrog, Petrozavodsk, Voronezh, and Saint Petersburg. Previous RuSSIR courses were taught by Eugene Agichtein, Sihem Amer-Yahia, Ricardo Baeza- Yates, Ben Carterette, Fabio Crestani, Katja Filippova, Djoerd Hiemstra, Evangelos Kanoulas, Mounia Lalmas, Marie-Francine Moens, Salvatore Orlando, Raffaele Perego, Andreas Rauber, Stefan Ruger, Horacio Saggion, James Shanahan, Fabrizio Silvestri, Mike Thelwall, Gerhard Weikum, Emine Yilmaz, and others. About the venue: The city of Yaroslavl is the administrative center of Yaroslavl Oblast, located 250 km northeast of Moscow. The population of the city is about 600,000 people. Founded in the 11th century by prince Yaroslav the Wise, Yaroslavl is one of the oldest Russian cities. Yaroslavl belongs to the Golden Ring, a group of towns northeast of Moscow that have played an important role in Russian history, which are now called "open air museums" and feature unique monuments of Russian architecture of the 12th–18th centuries. In 2010 Yaroslavl celebrated its 1,000th anniversary. The historical part of Yaroslavl is a World Heritage Site located at the confluence of the rivers Volga and Kotorosl. The history of the Yaroslavl Demidov State University can be traced back to the School of Higher Sciences that was founded in 1803 under the patronage of Pavel Grigoryevich Demidov. Today the Yaroslavl Demidov State University is the leading institution of higher education in the Upper-Volga region, with 8,000 students and 10 departments.