FQAS is the premier conference focusing on the key issue in the information society of providing easy, flexible, and intuitive access to information to everybody. In targeting this issue, the conference draws on several research areas, such as information retrieval, database management, information filtering, knowledge representation, soft computing, management of multimedia information, and human-computer interaction. The conference provides a unique opportunity for researchers, developers and practitioners to explore new ideas and approaches in a multidisciplinary forum. The previous FQAS events were held in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004.
The FQAS conference invites papers in all the above mentioned areas as well as in the following theme area (each FQAS event suggests a theme area): mobile users and ubiquitous environments. In fact, a flexible and human friendly access to information is becoming increasingly important also due to the large and growing number of mobile users and the emerging ubiquitous environments. The key problem in this context is to identify and respond to the user’s needs as intended in any situation. This problem contains a number of sub-problems, such as recognition of the user’s needs from the user’s input and context, consideration of the user’s preferences, and seamless connectivity between the mobile user and the resources of interest. As in daily life we can highly economize our communication, based on our experience and knowledge about each other, on the context, on our preferences, and on our aims, the same should be in human-system communication. Solutions to these problems can be defined through a multidisciplinary approach, by drawing upon research and developments in various areas, such as knowledge representation and reasoning under uncertainty, information retrieval, query and question answering, natural language understanding, and speech recognition.
We invite submission of original research contributions, and proposals for invited sessions, panels, and tutorials. Contributions are encouraged from all areas, as long as they address central issues in flexible query answering systems. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
All accepted papers will be published by Springer-Verlag in their Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI). Authors are invited to submit original previously unpublished research papers written in English, of up to 12 pages, strictly following the LNCS/LNAI format guidelines. Authors can download the Latex (recommended) or Word templates available at Springer's web site. Submissions not following the format guidelines will be rejected without review.
A Microsoft word version of the call for papers is also available for download.
