CIKM

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to CIKM 2020! The 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management was held online from the 19th to the 23rd of October 2020.

CIKM is an annual computer science conference, focused on research at the intersection of information retrieval, machine learning, databases as well as semantic and knowledge-based technologies. Since it was first held in the United States in 1992, 28 conferences have been hosted in 9 countries around the world. Reflecting on recent challenges faced by technologies, including artificial intelligence, the theme we have chosen for CIKM 2020 is Data and Knowledge for the Next Generation: Sustainability, Transparency and Fairness.

For the first time ever, CIKM is organized as an online event in 2020, as a response to the challenges raised by the COVID19 pandemic. Planning for an online event has opened new opportunities, for instance, by introducing new formats, increasing the accessibility of the conference to researchers from all around the world, reducing its environmental impact and ensuring an even wider outreach. The latter is ensured, for example, through online sessions and video talks being accessible to participants as well as persistently being archived for all paper presentations.

We are honoured to announce that this year's conference has received over 2,000 submissions across all paper tracks, including 970 full paper submissions and 397 short paper submissions to the research track. A total of 474 papers have been accepted, for an acceptance rate of 20% for full research papers and 26% for short papers. All submissions were assigned to qualified reviewers and senior PC members for review and decision-making. Reviewers and senior PC members were selected by the CIKM 2020 PC chairs based on a thorough selection process, considering their prior work and expertise as well as by rigorously assessing and removing any potential conflicts of interest. The proceedings of CIKM 2020 are published by ACM and are openly available throughout the duration of the conference.

CIKM2020 has introduced two additional innovations in the form of two new tracks. In line with the CIKM 2020 theme, the aim of the Resources track is to collect and strengthen works geared towards making research resources, such as datasets, benchmarks or frameworks, more accessible to the research community, thereby ensuring reproducibility and transparency of research. In addition, CIKM featured a Doctoral Consortium in 2020, providing a forum for postgraduate students to present and discuss their work with esteemed senior researchers in their fields.

We are proud to present four distinguished keynote speakers to CIKM 2020 attendees: Carlo Curino (Microsoft), Xin Luna Dong (Amazon), Michel Dumontier (Maastricht University), and Timnit Gebru (Google). In addition, a range of industry-driven presentations and papers are included through the Applied Research track of the conferences. CIKM 2020 also includes 9 workshops, 11 tutorials and two separate tracks in the CIKM 2020 AnalytiCup: The Retweet Prediction Challenge sponsored organised by the L3S Research Center, and the Adversarial Object Detection Challenge sponsored by AliBaba.