HSD 2013 - SIGIR 2013 Workshop on Health Search and Discovery: Helping Users and Advancing Medicine

This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners from industry and academia to discuss health search and discovery. We will focus on ways to make medical information more readily accessible to laypeople (including enhancements to ranking algorithms and search interfaces), and how we can discover new medical facts and phenomena from information sought by people, as evidenced in their query streams and other sources such as social media. This domain also presents unprecedented opportunities for applications that monitor and improve the quality of life of people with a variety of medical conditions, by providing tools to support their health-related information behavior.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Predictive analysis from large-scale data such as query logs, microblogging, etc.
Mining large-scale content (e.g., logs, Web crawls) to discovering insights and associations between conditions, drugs, cohorts, etc.
Establishing the reliability of health content (for crawling and ranking)
Diagnostic search by patients and health practitioners and its cognitive impacts
Impact of domain expertise on health seeking
Query formulation for medical retrieval (including query expansion, UMLS, concept-hierarchies, etc.)
Visualization and exploration of medical information
Privacy issues surrounding the storage and retrieval of medical content
Personalization and modeling short- and long-term health-related interests
Platforms for storing and maintaining health and fitness information (e.g., HealthVault)
Social networks for sharing and monitoring health-related content (e.g., PatientsLikeMe)
Submission Information
We solicit short, poster-length submissions of at most four pages in the ACM two-column proceedings format. Papers will be reviewed by workshop organizers or an external committee. Submissions should be in PDF format. All accepted submissions will be presented as posters, and a subset of them may be considered for oral presentation. Submissions reporting work in progress are acceptable, as we aim for the workshop to offer a venue for stimulating discussions.