Call for Special Session proposals - SISAP 2025

18th International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications

Reykjavik, Iceland, October 1-3, 2025

Important Dates

• Special Session proposal deadline: February 3, 2025 (AoE)
• Notification: February 17, 2025 (AoE)

Special sessions

Special sessions are mini-venues, each focusing on one state-of-the-art research direction within the field of similarity search and applications. Special session papers will supplement the regular research papers and be included in the proceedings of SISAP 2025, which will be published by Springer as a volume in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.

Special sessions should generally be organized in a moderated panel format, typically led by one of the special session chairs, where the authors have reduced time to present their work, followed by an extensive Q&A session with the audience. It is expected that special session chairs attend the conference. The panel format is a general guideline rather than a strict requirement. If a proposal envisages a different session format, we are open to such a submission and would negotiate it further.

Special Session Papers and Review Process

Normally, each special session will include four to five papers. Special session submissions may include vision/position papers, which will be evaluated based on the quality of the arguments and ideas proposed in the papers. In addition to invited papers, if any, the conference will also welcome open submissions to special sessions. In order to ensure high quality, all papers submitted to special sessions will be peer-reviewed through a strict review process, including papers solicited by the special session chairs. If a special session has many high-quality submissions, some of the submissions may potentially be moved to regular sessions; likewise relevant accepted submissions may be moved into special sessions.

The review process will be coordinated with the regular technical program review process, as coordinated by the PC chairs. The organizers of each special session must provide two reviews per submitted/invited paper, while the regular program committee will provide another two reviews. Final decision on acceptance/rejection will be proposed by the special session chairs and approved by the SISAP 2025 program committee chairs. If special session chairs submit work to their own session, the review process for those papers must be managed by the SISAP 2025 program committee chairs.

Special session papers must follow the same guidelines as regular research papers with respect to restrictions on formatting, length, and will follow a double-blind reviews procedure.

Special Session Proposal Submission Instructions

Special session proposals must be submitted by email to [email protected] by February 3, 2025. Proposals will be evaluated by SISAP 2025 general chairs and program committee chairs, based on the relevance to SISAP, qualification(s) of the organizer(s), proposal quality, and anticipated community interest in the topic/proposed potential papers.

• Title (and preferably an acronym) of the proposed special session.
• Name, affiliation, brief biography and contact information for each of the organizers.
• A session abstract including significance justification and a brief overview of the state-of-the-art of the proposed special session topic. Note: The session abstract should be in a format that can be copied directly to the conference web-page to advertise the session.
• List of solicited papers, if applicable, including for each paper: tentative title, author list, and preferably a short abstract; if session chairs anticipate submitting to their session, it is worth noting here as well.
• Proposal for arrangement of the reviews from session organizers (e.g. list of reviewers for the special session).
• Description of the session format (e.g. panel, technical talks, poster session).
• Plans for advertising the special session (e.g. targeted distribution lists, projects, communities)

Topics of Interest

• Similarity
  • Similarity queries (k-NN, range, reverse NN, top-k, Approximate and/or precise solutions, etc.)
  • Similarity measures (for vectors, graphs, structures, time series, complex data, tensors, secondary similarity, etc.)
  • Similarity operations (joins, ranking, classification, categorization, filtering, etc.)
• Scalability
  • Indexing and access methods for similarity-based processing
  • High-performance/large-scale similarity search (distributed, parallel, etc.)
  • Data management (transaction support, dynamic maintenance, etc.)
• Theory
  • Models of similarity
  • Intrinsic dimensionality and Curse of dimensionality
  • Discriminability and contrast
  • Languages for similarity databases
  • Manifolds and subspaces
• Analytics, Learning, Artificial Intelligence
  • Feature selection and extraction for similarity search
  • Representations learning for feature extraction
  • Visual analytics for similarity-based operations
  • Learning/adaptive similarity measures
  • Similarity in learning and mining
  • Merging/combining multiple similarity modalities
• Evaluation
  • Evaluation techniques for similarity queries and operations
  • Cost models and analysis for similarity data processing
  • Performance studies and comparisons
  • Test collections and benchmarks
• Applications
  • Multimedia retrieval systems
  • Dense retrieval
  • Vector databases
  • Similarity search in emerging data domains
  • Applications of similarity-based operations
  • Industrial applications and case studies
  • Similarity search cloud services
  • Security and privacy of in similarity search
  • Similarity for forensics and security