CIKM

On behalf of the organizing committee, it is my genuine honor and great pleasure to welcome you to the 21st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2012) in Maui, Hawaii! I hope this conference proves to be both interesting and beneficial.

Since its inception, the CIKM conference has provided a unique international forum for the presentation, discussion and dissemination of research findings in data management, information retrieval and knowledge management. The purpose of the conference is to identify challenging problems facing the development of future knowledge and information systems and to shape future research directions though the publication of high quality, applied and theoretical research findings. The conference has been a leading forum in which experts from academic, industry and the public sector gather to exchange ideas, research achievements and technical developments in multidisciplinary research areas.

As one of the world's most recognized conferences in the field, this year's CIKM conference has received a record high number of submissions in the history of CIKM, as can be seen from the following statistics:

• 1492 abstracts submitted

• 1088 full papers, 229 posters, and 70 demo papers submitted

• 146 papers accepted for presentation as full papers (13.4% acceptance rate) and 157 papers were accepted for short papers (27.8% cumulative acceptance rate)

The increased number of submissions alone is a great demonstration of the lively research areas that contribute to the CIKM area. In addition, CIKM 2012 will host 15 workshops on cutting-edge areas of research and a dedicated Industry Event featuring leading industrial practitioners. We are grateful to all authors who chose to submit their work to CIKM 2012 and are very excited by the final program.

CIKM values interdisciplinary research and we are proud to present three keynote speakers for the main conference (Dr. Ricardo Baeza-yates, Prof. William Cohen, and Prof. Jeffrey S. Vitter) and four keynote speakers for the Industry Event (Drs. Eric Brill, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Tom Malloy, and Xuedong Huang), all of whom will give presentations that cross discipline boundaries. I deeply appreciate their time and commitment to deliver their speeches and share their cutting-edge research experiences and insightful comments in their research topics.