PIM and Disappearing Desktop

PIM 2008 (Personal Information Management) will take place in April 5 & 6, 2008 in Florence, Italy. PIM is one of my favourite areas. The workshop's website defines this area as "… PIM is the practice and study of the activities people perform to acquire, organize, maintain, and retrieve information for everyday use. PIM is a growing area of interest as we all strive for better use of our limited personal resources of time, money, and energy, as well as greater workplace efficiency and productivity. Good research on the topic is being done in several disciplines, including human-computer interaction, database management, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence." The topics covered by this workshop include (1) Understanding PIM to understand how people manage their personal information beyond their desktop, how they find and re-find information, how they keep and organize information and methods and methodologies of PIM fieldwork: How do we study PIM? (2) Tools and Techniques in Support of PIM such as mobile and Web-based PIM tools, underlying data representation and the unification of personal information, tools for finding and re-finding personal information, tools for keeping and organizing personal information, methods and methodologies for the evaluation of PIM tools, teachable/learnable strategies of PIM (3) PIM in the Larger World including group information management, privacy and projection of personal information, security, law and policies (public and corporate), and PIM for different people and situations (e.g., patients, aging populations)The workshop theme is the "Disappearing Desktop". The traditional desktop computer and even the desktop computing metaphor may soon be relics of our digital information past. Many people now rely primarily on mobile computers, docking only on occasion to a larger keyboard and display. Other people do not rely on a single device, but rather access, organize, and manage their personal information through any device that provides access the Web. A rush of developments with mobile and Web-based computing is pulling the traditional digital desktop apart. As this happens, we face new challenges and opportunities in personal information management.

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