October 23-24, 2010; Orlando, Florida [NSF support for this workshop is being pursued]

Electronic solutions for storing, retrieving, sharing, and analyzing health related information are being rapidly developed and deployed. Solutions may be designed for health care professionals or consumers. resulting in a wide range of challenges. Textual and graphical information must be entered, updated, and retrieved. Frequent and infrequent users must be supported. Security must be maintained, collaboration should be supported, and privacy must be ensured.

This workshop focuses on the issues and challenges associated with ensuring access to this information by providers and consumers with disabilities. We seek to bring the health care and accessibility communities together to share experiences, discuss challenges, and develop a research agenda. This includes:

• individuals engaged in developing, deploying, or using electronic health records,
• individuals engaged in research on electronic health records
• individuals engaged in research on information technology accessibility
• individuals interested in becoming involved in any of the activities listed above.

This one and one-half day workshop will be co-located with ASSETS 2010 in Orlando, Florida and will take place on October 23-24. Travel funds including airfare, local travel, and hotel will be provided as well as several group meals.

Individuals interested in participating should submit a position statement of no more than two pages which outlines their background, relevant experience, how they anticipate contributing to the workshop, and the benefits they expect to receive through their participation. Position statements should be submitted electronically (send to asears-AT-umbc.edu) no later than August 2, 2010. Individuals will be informed if they have been selected to participate by August 16, 2010.

Workshop Organizers: Andrew Sears, UMBC, Vicki Hanson, University of Dundee

Labels: Call For Papers, Workshop

Current search systems are not adequate for individuals with specific needs: children, older adults, people with visual or motor impairments, and people with intellectual disabilities or low literacy. Search services are typically created for average users (young or middle-aged adults without physical or mental disabilities) and information retrieval methods are based on their perception of relevance as well. The workshop will be the first to raise the discussion on how to make search engines accessible for different types of users, including those with problems in reading, writing or comprehension of complex content. Search accessibility means that people whose abilities are considerably different from those that average users have will be able to successfully use search systems.

The objective of the workshop is to provide a forum and initiate collaborations between academics and industrial practitioners interested in making search more usable for users in general and for users with specific needs in particular. We encourage presentation and participation from researchers working at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, ambient intelligence and related areas.

Topics

The workshop welcomes contributions on any issue concerning accessible search, for instance:

• Understanding of search behavior of users with specific needs
• Understanding of relevance criteria of users with specific needs
• Understanding the effects of domain expertise, age, user experience and cognitive abilities on search goals and results evaluation
• Non-topical aspects of relevance: text style, readability, appropriateness of language (harassment and explicit content detection)
• Development of test collections for evaluation of accessible search systems
• Collaborative search techniques for assisting users with specific needs (e.g. parents helping children)
• Potential of search personalization techniques to satisfy users with specific needs
• Search interfaces and result representation for people with specific needs
• Using assistive technologies for interaction with search systems, e.g. speech recognition or eye tracking software for querying and browsing.

Invited Speakers

The organisers are pleased to announce two invited speakers who will present at the workshop:

Dr. T.V. Raman, Senior Research Scientist at Google Labs. Dr. Raman leads the project "Google Accessible Search", helping users with impairments to find accessible Web content.

Dr. Allison Druin, Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. Since 1998, Dr. Druin has led an interdisciplinary research teams looking for ways to improve information access for children and understand their search behaviour.

Papers and Posters

The conference language is English. The workshop will be a mix of oral presentations for long papers (maximum of 8 pages), a session for posters (maximum of 2 pages) and a panel discussion. All submissions will be reviewed by at least two program committee members. Workshop proceedings will be available at the workshop.

Please, submit papers in pdf-format, using the ACM SIG Proceedings style using EasyChair

Important Dates

4 June:

Paper submission deadline (previous deadline: 23 May)

16 June:

Notification of acceptance

23 June:

Camera-ready papers due (provisional, awaiting confirmation from the SIGIR conference chairs)

23 July:

Workshop in Geneva, Switzerland

Labels: Call For Papers, Workshop

The AAAS is hosting the Problem Solvers Workshop on Engineers with Disabilities on the13th, 14th, and 15th December 2009. This is an exciting workshop on engineers and engineering students with disabilities at AAAS, starting this Sunday at 4pm. A link to the agenda can be found at http://tiny.cc/x6oLB

Participants will be an extraordinary group of engineers and scientists with all types of disabilities, outstanding speakers, as well as advocates who want to broaden the participation of people with disabilities in STEM fields. At this date they would not require registration. Attendees who could attend all or part could simply let them know by email, so they have a count.

AAAS can be contacted at:

Postal:

Virginia W. Stern, Director
Project on Science, Technology and Disability,
ENTRY POINT! and ACCESS
American Association for the Advancement of Science
1200 New York Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20005

Phone:

+1 202-326-6672 (v/tdd)

Fax:

+1 202-371-9849

Email:

vstern@aaas.org

Labels: AAAS, Workshop