Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering

It is with honour and pleasure that we welcome you in Valletta for the 17th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering. DocEng 2017 is being organised by the University of Malta's Department of Systems and Control Engineering on the 4-7th September 2017. The symposium brings together experts in all areas of document engineering from both academia and industry, with the intention of presenting and discussing the most recent advances in the field of Document Engineering. Building on the experiences of previous years, the DocEng symposium program consists of one day of tutorials followed by three days of paper presentations. The program offers three half-day tutorials on Historic Document Processing, Document Engineering Issues in Malware Analysis and User Evaluation in the Document Engineering Field. DocEng2017 also keeps alive the tradition of the Birds of a Feather discussion group which will be led by Charles Nicholas. Of course, the highlight of the symposium will be the keynote talks. Sketched Visual Narratives for Image and Video Search by John Collomosse from the University of Surrey The Notarial Archives, Valletta: Starting from Zero by Theresa Zammit Lupi from theValletta Notarial Archives. DocEng received a total of 71 papers; 36 of these papers were submitted in April as full papers, with a further 35 papers being submitted in June as short papers and application notes. All papers were reviewed by at least three Program Committee members and based on these recommendations, the symposium accepted 13 (36%) papers as full papers, 13 (37%) as short papers with an oral presentation and a further 10 as poster presentations. This year, DocEng participated in the Review Quality Collector, an initiative for improving the quality of scientific peer review whereby reviewers were invited to grade their co-reviewers on aspects related to helpfulness to authors, timeliness and helpfulness for decision. Reviewers were given a receipt for their work for the symposium and the five top-ranked reviewers will be recognised during the symposium. The symposium continues in its support for student researchers who will be the future generation of researchers in document engineering. To this extent, DocEng 2017 offers students the opportunity to select a student mentor during the conference. The mentors, senior and experienced researchers will be able to discuss the student research, providing advice, feedback and constructive criticism. With the support of ACM SIGWEB, students are given travel grants to help them participate in the symposium.