Welcome & Introductions at the WSDM 2008

WSDM (pronounced “wisdom”) is a brand new ACM conference intended to be complementary to the World Wide Web Conference tracks in search and data mining. The pace of innovation in these areas has reached a level that requires more than one premier annual venue. Specifically, substantial work is currently being done in the areas of workload-driven crawling and monitoring, security and privacy, user profiling, personalized search and ranking, Web advertising, social media analysis, and spam detection. WSDM was first conceived in early 2006, and made reality by the efforts of many members of the search and data mining community. The conference owes a special debt of gratitude to Ziv Bar -Yossef, who nurtured the conference from conception to realization.