ACM SAC 2016 Travel Report

From the 4th to the 8th of April I had the pleasure to participate the 31st ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (ACM SAC), which was held in beautiful city Pisa, Italy. I was there to present my full paper "Measuring Semantic Distance for Linked Open Data-enabled Recommender Systems" and to participate the Student Research Competition sponsored by Microsoft.

This year, there were over 500+ registrations from 59 countries at this conference. There were 37 tracks and the overall acceptance rate for this year is 24%.

Keynotes:

There were two keynotes given by John Mylopoulos and Marco Conti, respectively. The first keynote is about the requirements problem in Software Engineering and the second keynote is about "From MANET to people-centric computing and communications.

Semantic Web Track:

There were two sessions with eight papers for Semantic Web Track where three of the participants two of the participants from our institute. Pasquale Minervini presented "Leveraging the Schema in Latent Factor Models for Knowledge Graph Completion" and another college Feng Gao presented "QoS-Aware Adaptation for Complex Event Service" in another (SOA) track.

Measuring Semantic Distance for Linked Open Data-enabled Recommender Systems from GUANGYUAN PIAO

Social Network and Media Analysis Track (SONAMA):

One of the papers in this track I'm interested in was "Inferring Semantic Interest Profiles from Twitter Followees: Does Twitter Know Better than Your Friends?" from Christoph Besel, University of Passau, Germany, which is related to my work. Although many previous works focused on using tweets for inferring user interest profiles, they used the alternative source (followees) to retrieve user interest profiles, which are based on the tendency that more and more users are consuming feeds instead of producing content on the social networks.

Student Research Competition (SRC):

I also participated in SAC SRC and went through 2nd round (top-5 list) and it was a good opportunity to compete across different disciplines. Congrats to all top-3 winners! 

Lunch

Banquet

What would make the conference better?

It would be better to have a Twitter channel to communicate and disseminate activities during the conference. Next year, it will be in Morocco and hope I could attend again:).

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Update after the conference:

The proceedings are available from June, 2016