ACM CIKM 2006 was the 15^th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. The conference continues to attract tremendous interest from academics and industry experts from all over the world. The focus of the 2006 CIKM conference was to identify challenging problems facing the development of future knowledge and information systems, and to shape future research directions through publication of high quality, applied and theoretical research findings. Dr. Edward A. Fox (right) and Dr. C.T. Lu (left) from Virginia Tech CS Department served as the Conference’s Program co-Chair and Local Chair, respectively. For their instrumental and outstanding roles in the conference, CIKM steering committee has selected them as recipients of the CIKM-06 Service Awards. Virginia Tech CS graduate students Arnold Boedihardjo, Feng Chen, David Dai, Ying Jin, Yufeng Kou, Xumin Liu, Ray Dos Santos, and Qi Yu participated as volunteering members assisting various tasks during the conference.

This year CIKM received a record 537 submissions. From these CIKM accepted 81 (15%) as full papers and 56 (10%) poster papers. Such highly competitive selection placed CIKM in a small group of prominent conferences and reflected the level of quality of its research program. The CIKM conference assembled program spanned the areas of databases (DB), information retrieval (IR), and knowledge management (KM). This year, the DB track papers addressed issues on data streams, skyline, ranking and similarity computations, as well as query processing, and indexing. The IR track covered traditional topics, but also had papers on estimation, personalization, and summarization. The KM track focused on data, text and web mining, and management of knowledge. The submission process was organized into the three corresponding tracks with corresponding Program Committees. There was also a separate industry track whose papers were reviewed by members of the program committees. In total we received 119 submissions in the DB track, 245 in the IR, 154 in the KM, and 19 submissions in the industrial track.

CIKM has matured to become a truly international conference, attracting submissions from all around the world. This year, less than half of the submitted papers were from North America (48%), while Asia and Europe followed with 24% and 20%, respectively. CIKM also had 18 submissions from South America, 17 from Australia, and 4 from Africa. The author coordinates spanned more than 35 countries.

Finally, the CIKM brought three prominent keynote speakers, Hector Garcia-Molina (Stanford University), Gary Flake (Microsoft Live Labs), and Joseph Kielman (Department of Homeland Security) which have provided insightful and enjoyable talks. CIKM 2007 will be held in Lisboa, Portugal.