The 21st ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng 2021) seeks original research papers that focus on the design, implementation, development, management, use and evaluation of advanced systems where documents and document collections play a key role. DocEng emphasizes innovative approaches to document engineering technology, use of documents and document collections in real-world applications, and novel principles, tools and processes that improve our ability to create, manage, maintain, share, and productively use these. In particular, DocEng 2021 seeks contributions in the area of cooperative work with documents. You are invited to submit original papers to DocEng 2021, to be held in Limerick, Ireland. Attendees at this international forum have interests that span all aspects of document engineering and applications.

DocEng'21 is organised by the University of Limerick, Ireland and will be held virtually using Zoom and Slack. For more information please visit our Programme page https://doceng.org/doceng2021/program

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Keynote Speakers

We are delighted to announce two wonderful keynote speakers for the DocEng'21:

Dr. Ophir Frieder: "Searching Harsh Documents".

Dr. Frieder focuses on scalable information processing systems with particular emphasis on health informatics. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, AIMBE, IEEE, and NAI, an Inaugural Member of the ACM SIGIR Academy, and a Member of Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Heavily involved with industrial efforts, he is the Lead Science and Technology Advisor for Aurora: The Business Forge and Chief Scientific Officer of Invaryant, Inc. He is a member of the computer science faculty at Georgetown University and the biostatistics, bioinformatics and biomathematics faculty in the Georgetown University Medical Center.

Conventional, textual document search is arguably well understood. Traditional and modern (neural) algorithms are available; benchmark collections and evaluation metrics are prevalent. However, not all documents are conventional or purely textual. We explore what is takes to search “harsh” document collections. Such collections comprise potentially of documents that are natively non-digital, are multilingual, include components that are not strictly textual, are corrupted, or are a combination thereof. We address machine readability and its implication on search. We overview component segmentation and integration as a search process. We describe the processing of search queries that are informationally deficient or corrupt. We then comment on the evaluation of the selected efforts presented and highlight their history from concept to practice. We conclude with a brief commentary on ongoing efforts.

Dr. Justin Picard: "20 years of physical document and product protection using digital methods".

Dr. Picard is an engineer and entrepreneur who currently serves as the chief technology officer (CTO) of Scantrust, a product authentication and traceability company that he co-founded in 2013. He is the inventor of the copy detection pattern, a digital authentication technology for detecting product and document counterfeiting. Picard is a member of the OECD Task Force on Countering Illicit Trade, and of the network of experts at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. He is also a co-founder of the non-governmental organisation Black Market Watch, where he developed a methodology to assess the impacts of illicit trade.

"The human hand can copy all that the human hand creates”, said Baron von Eichtal in 1843 when he was in charge of banknote issuing for the bank of Bavaria. Despite all the advancements in security printing and anti-counterfeiting, these words ring more true than ever. Indeed in the last thirty years, counterfeiters have greatly benefited from the globalisation of supply chains and from the digitization of production methods. Yet the development of digital technologies has also opened unprecedented possibilities for addressing the 3000 years old problem of counterfeiting. This presentation will review some of the counterfeit detection techniques developed in the last 20 years, including printed digital watermarks, copy detection patterns and secure QR Codes. Such technologies not only open up the possibility for potentially anyone to verify authenticity with their smartphones, but they also enable the digitization of the trillions of physical documents, packaging and products that we handle every year. Real world examples from industrial applications and some of the current research problems will be discussed

Contact Information

Please contact the organizers via doceng2021@ul.ie

DocEng on Twitter

The DocEng account on Twitter is @ACMDocEng. Post and search using the #DocEng hashtag..

Hypertext 2021

Check out the 32nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media also taking place virtually the week after DocEng 2021 with an Irish host, Dublin! To regsiter, visit: http://ht.acm.org/ht2021/registration/