Program Chairs:
Gonzalo Navarro (Universidad de Chile) and
Vladimir Pestov (University of Ottawa)
Local organizer: Vladimir Pestov (University of Ottawa)

SISAP Official Conference Homepage	Key Dates	Confirmed Participants	Accommodation in Toronto
Program Committee	audio and slides	Submissions	Previous SISAP's

Registration Fees

Registration fees include: the proceedings, coffee breaks, lunch and dinner on Thursday and the excursion to Niagara Falls on Friday, August 10.
Before July 8 regular fee: $350, student fee $250
After July 8 regular fee: $ 450, student fee $350

Proceeding pages: Payment for extra pages, either 1 or 2, upon preliminary approval of Program Chairs: $ 50 per page

Extra tickets: Dinner - extra dinner ticket $ 75, Excursion - extra ticket to Niagara $ 130

Application for travel support for students, deadline to apply June 30.

Conference Background:

The International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications (SISAP) is an annual conference devoted to similarity searching, with an emphasis on metric space searching. It aims to fill in the gap left by the various scientific venues devoted to similarity searching in spaces with coordinates, by providing a common forum for theoreticians and practitioners around the problem of similarity searching in general spaces (metric and non-metric) or using distance-based (as opposed to coordinate-based) techniques in general. SISAP aims to become an ideal forum to exchange real-world, challenging and exciting examples of applications, new indexing techniques, common test beds and benchmarks, source code, and up-to-date literature through a web page serving the similarity searching community. Authors are expected to use the test beds and code from the SISAP web site for comparing new applications, databases, indexes and algorithms.

The Fifth SISAP conference will be hosted by the Fields Institute in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on August 9-10, 2012. The proceedings of SISAP 2012 will be published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. A small selection of best papers will be recommended for inclusion in a special issue of Information Systems journal (Elsevier) dedicated to this conference.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Range search
knn search
Limited-range knn search
Reverse knn search
New complex similarity query types
Similarity joins
Clustering (applied to indexing)
Indexing based on hashing
Parallelism & distributed algorithms
Approximate searching
Computation of intrinsic dimension
Cost models
Embeddings
Languages for similarity databases

Conference structure:

Contributions to the conference fall into three categories: full papers, posters, and demos. All submissions are subjected to rigorous refereeing process and papers are published in a volume of proceedings made available to participants at the start of the conference. SISAP 2008 and 2009 were organized in cooperation with IEEE, while SISAP 2010 was organized in cooperation with the ACM Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (SIGSPATIAL) and the papers were indexed in the ACM Digital Library.
http://www.sisap.org/Metric Space Library.html

Schedule:

Wednesday August 8th, 2012
4:30 p.m.	Welcome Reception at the Fields Institute
Thursday August 9th, 2012
8:30 a.m.	On-site registration and materials pick-up
9:15 a.m.	Welcome
9:30 a.m.	Keynote talk: Pavel Zezula, "Future Trends in Similarity Searching"
10:30 a.m.	Coffee
10:50 a.m.	Session 1: New Scenarios and Approaches Snake Table: A Dynamic Pivot Table for Streams of k-NN Searches (slides) Juan Manuel Barrios, Benjamin Bustos and Tomas Skopal Algorithmic Exploration of Axiom Spaces for Efficient Similarity Search at Large Scale (slides) Tomas Skopal and Tomas Bartos Polyphasic Metric Index: Reaching the Practical Limits of Proximity Searching Eric Sadit Tellez, Edgar Chavez and Karina Figueroa
12:05 p.m.	Lunch provided
1:35 p.m.	Session 2: Improving Metric Data Structures Efficient Similarity Search in Metric Spaces with Cluster Reduction Luis G. Ares, Nieves R. Brisaboa, Alberto Ordonez Pereira and Oscar Pedreira Cut-region: A Compact Building Block for Hierarchical Metric Indexing Jakub Lokoc, Premysl Cech, Jiri Novak and Tomas Skopal Static-to-dynamic Transformation for Metric Indexing Structures Bilegsaikhan Naidan and Magnus Lie Hetland
2:40 p.m.	Coffee
3:10 p.m.	Session 3: New Similarity Spaces Revisiting Techniques for Lowerbounding the Dynamic Time Warping Distance Tomas Bartos and Tomas Skopal A Multivariate Correlation Distance for Vector Spaces Richard Connor and Robert Moss Fast Similarity Computation in Factorized Tensors Michael E. Houle, Hisashi Kashima and Michael Nett
4:30 p.m.	Demo Session (Stewart Library, Fields Institute 3rd floor) SIR: The Smart Image Retrieval Engine Jakub Lokoc, Tomas Grosup and Tomas Skopal SimTandem: Similarity Search in Tandem Mass Spectra Jiri Novak, Jakub Galgonek, David Hoksza and Tomas Skopal
6:00 p.m	Drinks and Conference Dinner (L’Espresso by Bar Mercurio)
Friday August 10, 2012
8:30 a.m.	Morning Coffee
9:00 a.m	Keynote talk: Santosh Vempala, "Effective Principal Component Analysis"
10:00 a.m.	Session 4: Searching in Specific Spaces Super-linear Indices for Approximate Dictionary Searching Leonid Boytsov Visual Image Search: Feature Signatures or/and Global Descriptors Jakub Lokoc, David Novak, Michal Batko and Tomas Skopal
10:50	Coffee
11:10	Session 5: Facing Scalability Issues DSACL+-tree: A Dynamic Data Structure for Similarity Search in Secondary Memory Luis Britos, A. Marcela Printista and Nora Reyes Scalable Distributed Algorithm for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search Problem in High Dimensional General Metric Spaces Yury Malkov, Alexander Ponomarenko, Andrey Logvinov and Vladimir Krylov Parallel Approaches to Permutation-Based Indexing using Inverted Files Hisham Mohamed and Stephane Marchand-Maillet
Niagara Excursion
12:30 p.m	Pick up bagged lunch
12:45 p.m	Bus departs from the Fields Institute
2:45 p.m.	Peninsula Ridge Estates Winery (wine tour and tasting)
4:00 p.m.	Arrive at Niagara Falls
6:30 p.m.	Dinner at Skylon Tower
8:15 p.m.	Bus departs for the Fields Institute

Workshop Participants

Full Name	University/Affiliation
Bartos, Tomas	Charles University in Prague
Boytsov, Leonid
Bustos, Benjamin	University of Chile
Cech, Premysl	Charles University
Chávez, Edgar	University of Michoacan
Connor, Richard	University of Strathclyde
Figueroa, Karina	Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo
Houle, Michael	National Institute of Informatics
Lokoc, Jakub	Charles University in Prague
Mohamed, Hisham	University of Geneva
Moss, Robert	University of Strathclyde
Naidan, Bilegsaikhan	Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Navarro, Gonzalo	University of Chile
Nett, Michael	University of Tokyo
Novak, Jiri	Charles University in Prague
Pedreira, Oscar	Universidade da Coruña
Pestov, Vladimir	University of Ottawa
Ponomarenko, Alexander	MeraLabs
Skopal, Tomas	Charles University in Prague
Stojmirovic, Aleksandar	NIH
Tellez, Eric Sadit	Universidad Michoacana
Vempala, Santosh	Georgia Institute of Technology
Yang, Lu	University of New Brunswick
Zezula, Pavel	Masaryk University

Previous SISAPs:

2008, Cancun, Mexico (ICDE+IEEE, J. of Discrete Algorithms)
2009, Prague, Czech Republic (IEEE+ACM, Information Systems)
2010, Istanbul, Turkey (ACM, J. of Discrete Algorithms)
2011, Lipari, Italy (ACM, Information Systems)