(apologies for any cross-postings you receive) Call for Papers for a special academic session on Visualization for Decision Making, Information Sharing, and Collaboration (session ID: HCI-02) ISCRAM 2008 5th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management Washington, DC, USA May 4-7, 2008 http://www.iscram.org Motivation for this session: Information visualization can play a critical role in decision making, collaboration, and sharing information during crisis management and response. Both managers and responders deal with large volumes of data from a variety of sources that they must evaluate, correlate, and use to make time-critical decisions. Collaborative visualizations of data can help collocated and distributed teams maintain situational awareness. In practice, most collaborative use of visualizations occurs during planning; during an incident, use of visualization may be relegated to the individual's realm while collaboration may revert to audio channels. We seek research on the use of visualization to improve decision making, dissemination of information, and collaboration during crisis response and management. Topics of interest include but are not limited to: * Synthesis of novel information from diverse data sources * Visualization on hand-held devices for responders in the field * Collaborative information displays for remote and collocated teams * Innovative visual analytics techniques for events across space and time * Scalable representations of very large volumes of highly heterogeneous data * Analytical reasoning including the human analytic discourse, knowledge discovery methods, perception and cognition, and collaborative visual analytics * Presentation, production, and dissimilation methods including methods and tools for capturing the analytics process, and story telling for specific and varying audiences This is an Academic Session: We invite researchers from academia or research labs to present their research or research-in-progress papers. Prospective presenters submit a regular research (or research-in-progress) paper. Important Notice: * All submissions must be formatted according to the ISCRAM 2008 formatting guidelines. Templates and instructions are published on www.iscram.org. * All submissions must be submitted through the ISCRAM 2008 conference paper submission web page at www.conftool.com/iscram2008. Instructions for the ConfTool system can be found on www.iscram.org. * All papers and presentations will go through a double-blind review process, leading to a decision of (conditional) acceptance or rejection. * Accepted papers will be included in the ISCRAM 2008 program and published in the official proceedings if and only if * (1) the paper is formatted according to the instructions, * (2) the authors sign the copyright transfer form, and * (3) one of the authors registers for the conference and pays the registration fee before the cut-off date for early registration. * Authors who have multiple papers accepted can only register for and present one paper at the conference; co-authors need to register separately. Important ISCRAM 2008 Dates: * December 21, 2007: Paper submission deadline * February 10, 2008: Notification of (conditional) acceptance * February 22, 2008: Early registration deadline * March 1, 2008: Final camera-ready paper submission deadline * May 4-7, 2008: ISCRAM 2008 About ISCRAM: The ISCRAM Community is a worldwide community of researchers, scholars, teachers, students, practitioners and policy makers interested or actively involved in the subject of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management. At its annual international conference alternating between the US and Europe, the ISCRAM Community gathers to present and discuss the latest research and developments in this growing area during an interactive and stimulating 3 day program. The ISCRAM Community also organizes an International Summer School for PhD students and ISCRAM-CHINA, an annual conference for ISCRAM research in China. All information on ISCRAM can be found at http://www.iscram.org <blocked::http://www.iscram.org/> ISCRAM 2008 will be held from 4-7 May at the George Washington University (GWU) located in Washington, DC, USA. The conference will be hosted by GWU's Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management (ICDRM). All details on this conference will be made available via the ISCRAM website mentioned above. You can find a full list of sessions online at: http://www.iscram.org/index.php?option=content&task=category§ionid= 1&id=109&Itemid=2 <blocked::http://www.iscram.org/index.php?option=content&task=category& sectionid=1&id=109&Itemid=2> Aaron Burgman & Beth Yost Session Chairs {aburgman, bethyost}@mitre.org