### to whom it may concern. //fw.

*** APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTINGS

Deadline approaching: 10.02.2006

------------------------------------------------------------- Call for Papers IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering A Special Issue on Customer Relationship Management: Data Mining Meets Marketing Planned for: Early 2007 -------------------------------------------------------------

Customer Relationship Management emerged in the last decade to reflect the central role of customers for the strategic positioning of a company. CRM encompasses all measures to achieve customer understanding and to exploit this knowledge in marketing and production. Accordingly, it requires integration of customer-related data, meta-data and background knowledge, to provide a coordinated analysis of this integrated data.

Central to CRM are the correct and complete understanding of the customers and derivation of concerted actions from this understanding. Traditionally, Knowledge and Data Engineering is observed as a key enabler for CRM, delivering knowledge discovery methods for customer profiling, classification, segmentation and response prediction scalable technologies for processing of large customer bases and of streams of customer transaction data methodologies for the integration of heterogeneous collections of data at different levels of abstraction and with varying degrees of internal structure tools and standards for the specification of meta-information and methods for the incorporation of meta-data into the knowledge discovery process frameworks for the formulation of recommendations and the design of personalized services, especially in e-commerce applications.

However, many of these contributions focus on isolated CRM problems, the emphasis being more on the discovery of correct patterns than on obtaining deep insights into customer behaviour. Some of the challenges that are still open today include the integrated analysis of customer data and texts (e.g., product descriptions and customer feedback), incorporation of extracted knowledge into the production and marketing cycle, incorporation of various types of background knowledge into the analysis, and systematic re-evaluation of extracted knowledge against drifting customer preferences and profiles.

In this special issue, we solicit submissions describing innovative Knowledge and Data Engineering methods for CRM challenges, with a particular focus on the areas of knowledge discovery and data/text mining, of data warehousing and advanced database technologies. We particularly encourage contributions that take a holistic and integrated view of the customers, their static data, their implicit and explicit preferences, and their behaviour across various interaction channels.

To reflect the interdisciplinary nature of the CRM field, we encourage all authors to place their contributions into a broader, customer-centered framework and explain how their work helps to solve complex and integrated CRM problems and how it considers demands from and provides insights to other disciplines, such as marketing.

Topics of Interest to the Special Issue --------------------------------------- * Customer segmentation methods * Building customer models and profiles * Management of customer bases * Mining structured, semi-structured and unstructured data * Mining e-commerce clickstream/usage data * Collecting, extracting, analyzing consumer opinion data * Personalization and recommender systems * Discovering trends in customer data and customer intelligence * Visualization of customer data * Building customer-centered data warehouses * Data streams and CRM * Event monitoring and triggering * Methods for building learning relationships with customers * Models and metrics for valuing customers over their life time * Managing customer interaction cycle (including Web based) * Methods for contact management and lead capture * Data and stream analysis for self-service applications * Methods for design and evaluation of flexible pricing models

Submission Guidelines --------------------- Submission Guidelines --------------------- Please follow the formatting guideline at: http://www.computer.org/tkde/author_new.htm and submit your papers to Manuscript Central at http://cs-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com/ You must select "Special Issue CRM" from the drop-down menu for the manuscript type!

Important dates --------------- Submission Deadline for Papers: 10-Feb-06 *** NEW Completion of 1st Round of Reviews: 30-Apr-06 Minor Revisions Due: 20-May-06 Major Revisions Due: 20-June-06 Completion of 2nd Round of Reviews: 31-Jul-06 Minor Revisions Due: 17-Aug-06 Completion of Minor Revision Review: 25-Aug-06 Acceptance Letters Sent: 07-Sep-06

Please feel free to contact the Peer Review Manager, Suzanne Werner (swerner@computer.org) or the guest editors (crm_tkde@iti.cs.uni-magdeburg.de) if you have any questions.

Special Issue Guest Editors --------------------------- Bing Liu, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA Myra Spiliopoulou, University Magdeburg, Germany Jaideep Srivastava, University of Minnesota, USA Alexander Tuzhilin, New York University, USA

-- Prof. Dr. Myra Spiliopoulou Research group KMD: Knowledge Management & Discovery in Information Systems Institute of Technical and Business Information Systems Faculty of Computer Science Otto-von-Guericke-Universitaet Magdeburg PO Box 4120, D-39016 Magdeburg Germany

Phone: ++49.391.67 18967 Fax: ++49.391.67 18110 Email: myra@iti.cs.uni-magdeburg.de Webpage: http://omen.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/itikmd/