Proceedings of the 2008 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining
Preface
We are pleased to welcome you to the Eighth SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2008) in Atlanta, Georgia. This year the conference received 282 papers. The submissions reflected the truly international character of this conference; the submissions came from 24 different countries and territories: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Israel, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, The UK, and The USA.
Each submitted paper was reviewed initially by at least three members of the international program committee. Area chairs then initiated discussion on papers with discrepant scores. For the first time, this year we sought author feedback for selected papers, mainly to clarify technical issues. Area chairs subsequently provided their recommendations to the program co-chairs, who then collated and refined these suggestions across all areas. In the end, 40 papers were selected to appear as full papers, and 37 papers were selected as short papers or posters. We believe that the hard work of all the authors, reviewers, and area chairs has resulted in an excellent set of papers that will be valuable both to researchers and practitioners in data mining for many years to come.
As in previous years, in addition to the regular paper presentation tracks, this year’s program also features the plenary poster spotlight track prior to the poster reception. Poster presenters will be given two minutes to advertise and articulate their work. We hope that these very quick presentations will give attendees a sense of the problems that are solved in the posters and encourage them to discuss the posters with their authors during the subsequent poster session.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the program committee members and external reviewers for their help in the difficult task of reviewing and choosing papers for presentation and posters. We are especially grateful for the help of the area chairs, Naoki Abe, Chris Clifton, Inderjit S. Dhillon, Wei Fan, Lise Getoor, Bart Goethals, Vasant Honavar, Eamonn Keogh, Bamshad Mobasher, Zoran Obradovic, and Jian Pei, who handled the reviewing process with great care and insight.
We would also like to thank all the SIAM staff members who have contributed to this conference—it is in large part through their efforts that things got done on time. We are also grateful to Chid Apte, Haesun Park, Chandrika Kamath, and Vipin Kumar for offering guidance on various program related issues. Last but not least, this conference would not be possible without the excellent papers and presentations represented in these proceedings. We thank all the authors for their participation in SDM 2008.
Once again, we welcome you to SDM 2008 and trust that you will enjoy the conference!
Mohammed J. Zaki and Ke Wang
Program Chairs
