Four papers from Apex lab have been accepted by ACM SIGIR 2008, the top conference on Information Retrieval, following our four acceptances at WWW 2007. This year's SIGIR conference has received 496 submissions from top research institutions and universities all over the world and accepted 85 of them, rendering an accepting rate of 17%. There are totally 9 acceptances from Mainland China. The accepted papers from our lab are: Exploring Folksonomy for Personalized Search by Shengliang Xu et al., Deep Classification in Large-scale Text Hierarchies by Gui-Rong Xue et al., Topic-bridged PLSA for Cross-Domain Text Classification by Gui-Rong Xue et al. and Learning to Rank with Ties by Ke Zhou et al. This year's SIGIR conference will be held in Singapore from July. 20 to 24. The official website is http://www.sigir2008.org/ .

Wenyuan Dai's paper, Self-taught Clustering, which is on Machine Learning, has been accepted by ICML 2008. This paper extends Transfer Learning to the clustering problem and has important theoretical value. This year's ICML conference will be held in Helsinki, Finland from June. 5 to 9. The official website is http://icml2008.cs.helsinki.fi/.

Two papers of our lab have been accepted by ACL 2008, the top conference in the area of Natural Language Processing. They are Searching Questions by Identifying Question Topic and Question Focus by Huizhong Duan et al. and A Probabilistic Model for Fine-Grained Expert Search by Shenghua Bao et al. Accepting rate of the conference is 25%, and the conference will be held in Columbus, USA on June. 15.

Two papers of our lab have been accepted by WWW 2008, the prestigious conference on the World Wide Web. They are Can Chinese Web Pages be Classified with English Data Source? by Xiao Ling et al. and Recommending Questions Using the MDL-Based Tree Cut Model by Yunbo Cao. This year's WWW conference will be held in Beijing, China from April. 21 to April. 25.

Five papers of our lab have been accepted by ISWC 2007, the prestigious conference on the Semantic Web. This year's ISWC will be held in Busan, Korea. The official website is http://iswc2007.semanticweb.org/. List of Accepted Papers

Bridged Refinement for Transfer Learning by Dikan Xing et al.has won the PKDD 2007 Best Student Paper Award. This year's PKDD/ECML conference will be held in Warsaw, Porland. The official website is http://www.ecmlpkdd2007.org/.

Four papers have been accepted by a top conference on the Internet, World Wide Web (WWW2007). They are Optimizing Web Search Using Social Annotation by Shenghua Bao et al., Homepage Live: Automatic Block Tracing for Web Personalization by Jie Han et al., Exploring in the Weblog Space by Detecting Informative and Affective Articles by Xiaochuan Ni et al. and Towards Effective Browsing of Large Scale Social Annotations by Rui Li et al. The major topics of WWW are concering the existing problems of the Web and investigating future key technoligies. This year's conference will be held in Banff, Candana, from May 5th to May 12th. The official website is http://www2007.org/ Attendee Best Student Paper Nominee,Photo.

The paper entitled Boosting for Transfer Learning has been accepted by ICML 2007. ICML is one of the top conferences on machine learning. The paper is written by Wenyuan Dai et al., investigating the learning problem across different distribution data. It has important meaning to the research of transfer learning. This is the first paper from our lab accepted by ICML. This year, ICML will be held in Oregon, USA, from June 20th to 24th. The official website is http://oregonstate.edu/conferences/icml2007/.

The paper entitled Transferring Naive Bayes Classifiers for Text Classification has been accepted by AAAI 2007. It is written by Wenyuan Dai et al., investigating the learning problem across different distribution data. It has important meaning to the research of transfer learning. This is the second paper accepted by AAAI which comes from our lab. AAAI is one of the most authoritative conferences in the area of artificial intelligence. It will be held in Vancouver, Canada, from July 22nd to 26th. The official website is http://www.aaai.org/Conferences/AAAI/aaai07.php.

Shanghua Bao has been selected out of 575 candidates from Harvard University, Stanford University, Tsinghua University, Peiking University, as well as Shanghai Jiao Tong University, to be awarded IBM (Global) Ph.D. Fellowship 2007. IBM Ph.D. Fellowships are awarded worldwide. IBM Ph.D. Fellows are awarded tuition, fees, and a stipend for one nine-month academic year. Stipends vary by country/geography and the student will be informed at the time of the award what the stipend is for their country/geography. All IBM Ph.D. Fellows are matched with an IBM Mentor according to their technical interests, and they are encouraged to intern at an IBM research or development laboratory under their Mentor's guidance. An IBM ThinkPad is awarded during the internship. Internship assignments are designed to strengthen and broaden the Awardee's technical experience and contacts.

The awarding ceremony of Excellent Ph.D. Thesis 2006 has been held in Beijing recently by China Computer Federation (CCF). This is the first time of the award. 7 excellent Ph.D. from university across the whole nation have been granted the award. Dr. Gui-Rong Xue, under the suprivision of Prof. Yong Yu, is one of them. His doctoral thesis is entitled Multi-Relationship Hetegrnious Objects Based Web Mining. The chairmen of CCF, Academian Guojie Li, and the Director of Microsoft Research Asia, Dr. Harry Shawn are the two awarding guests.