
Editorial
… and ECIR 2015 will be held in …hold on, let’s first look at past events before we look ahead. This summer was packed with IR-related events. It all started with SIGIR 2013 in Dublin. Dublin seems to be one of THE places for organising conferences right now with ECIR and SIGIR now over and […]

Celebrating Stephen Robertson’s Retirement
Stephen Robertson retired from the Microsoft Research Lab. in Cambridge during the summer of 2013 after a long career as one of the most influential, well liked and eminent researchers in Information Retrieval throughout the world. Stephen began his research career in the late 1960’s when he took an M.Sc. in Information Science at City […]

Musing on the theory of it all — ICTIR 2013
The 4th International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2013) took place from September 29, 2013 to October 2, 2013, in the beautiful Danish capital of Copenhagen hosted by the University of Copenhagen, Department of Computer Science. As the name suggests this conference is primarily concerned with theoretical aspects of IR, however there […]
Tabs, facets and views: getting the interaction right
As the dominant interaction paradigm used throughout the world of eCommerce, faceted search provides a framework that supports the exploration and selection among thousands – if not millions – of diverse items. But sometimes faceted search needs to be combined with other types of UI control to provide alternative ways to view and organise content. […]

Conference Review: SIGIR 2013
SIGIR 2013 was hosted by CNGL (Centre for Next Generation Localisation) which is based in Dublin City University and Trinity College Dublin. The main conference was held at Trinity College Dublin with plenary sessions held at the mansion house just 100 yards away. The busy five day schedule consisted of three days of main conference […]
Events Autumn 2013
One day events Search solutions 2013. The group’s annual practitioner focused event on search. We also have tutorial day associated with the event. BCS offices Covent Garden. http://irsg.bcs.org/SearchSolutions/2013/sse2013.php Conferences/Workshops 76th Annual Meeting of ASIST. A general LIS conference with many themes on information retrieval. 1-6 November 2013, Centre Sheraton, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. http://asis.org/asist2013/AM2013CFP.pdf ISMIR 2013 […]

Editorial
Melting motorways and buckled rails? The summer has arrived in England. Welcome to a new edition of Informer. This is a Special Summer Edition in that we kept this issue (and the editorial) as short as possible so that we do not distract you too much from your summer reading. First some updates on what the […]

13th Dutch-Belgian Workshop on Information Retrieval
The DIR workshop traditionally represents one of the annual highlights for information retrieval researchers in Belgium and the Netherlands. Hosted alternatingly in between the Netherlands and Belgium it serves as a venue for networking, sharing and discussing late-breaking research results as well as promoting recent publications in international key conferences and journals. A special emphasis […]

Information Wayfinding, Pt 2: Elements of the Information Environment
In Part 1 of this series, I argued that vestiges of the pre-Web, print era still haunt digital experiences. To create information environments that are truly coherent, we must view them not as books full of pages, but as spaces to navigate and explore—much like finding our way through a city or a museum. This is […]
Book Review : Recommender Systems for Social Tagging Systems: A review
Recommender Systems for Social Tagging Systems: A review by Epaminondas Kapetanios ISBN 978-1-4614-1894-8 The book, authored by Leandro Balby Marinho, Andreas Hotho, Robert Jäschke, Alexandros Nanopoulos, Steffen Rendle, Lars Schmidt, Thieme Gerd Stumme, Panagiotis Symeonidis, and published by Springer in 2012, discusses the role of recommender systems in order to serve social tagging systems. With […]
Call for Book Reviews (Summer 2013)
This issue we include another Call for Reviews in which we seek reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to the IR community. Books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are interested […]
Events Summer 2013
Conferences/Workshops TSD 2013: Sixteenth International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE. Of interest to members working in the area of the search for both spoken and written documents. Plzen (Pilsen), Czech Republic, 1-5 September 2013. http://www.tsdconference.org MCW2013: The 4th International Symposium on Information Management in a Changing World. Of interest to members working in the […]

Editorial
Welcome back! This spring 2013 edition of Informer will bring you a range of fairly different articles, perhaps just the right mix for this time of the year. More about the articles later, let us first have a glimpse at what has been going on in the IR community. SIGIR 2013 is taking shape. Following the […]
Information Wayfinding, Part 1: A Not-So-New Metaphor
Browsing the Web. Surfing the Net. Navigating a Web site. Traversing a hierarchy. Going back. Scrolling up and down. Returning home. We’ve seen such metaphors throughout our history of using computers to interact with information. Haphazard though they may seem be, these metaphors highlight a universal reality of human psychology: we perceive the world—both physical […]
Call for Book Reviews (Spring 2013)
This issue we include another Call for Reviews in which we seek reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to the IR community. Books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are interested […]

Interaction Models for Faceted Search
Introduction Faceted search offers tremendous potential for transforming the search experience. It provides a flexible framework by which users can satisfy a wide variety of information needs, ranging from simple fact retrieval to complex exploratory search and discovery scenarios. But there is one design aspect of faceted search that is particuarly hard to get right: […]
Search: Emergent and Extrinsic Semantics
Semantics is a term often used in the search technology and information retrieval community these days. A distinction is drawn between semantic and traditional search, implying that somehow semantic search is a more advanced or sophisticated form. My claim in this article is that there are actually two forms of semantic search: emergent and extrinsic. […]

Hybrid Parallel Classifiers for Managing Big Data with Hierarchies
“Big Data” is one of the latest buzzwords in the IT industry nowadays. Companies are building up huge stores of data running into terabytes and more. Data hierarchies are getting bigger and bigger and more complex. At the same time, search/categorization speeds are also expected to increase. Single classifiers are now unable to deal with […]

Information Retrieval Group, University of Duisburg-Essen
(This article was co-authored with Sascha Kriewel, University of Duisburg-Essen.) The Information Retrieval group at the University of Duisburg-Essen is part of the Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science Department in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen. The department provides degree programmes in Applied Computer Science as well as in Applied […]

Applied research at the Competence Center Information Retrieval and Machine Learning of DAI Laboratory, TU Berlin
The Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) Laboratory at Technische Universität Berlin, headed by Prof. Dr. Sahin Albayrak, works on providing solutions for a new generation of systems and services to support our everyday life, coined as “smart services and smart systems”. The institute currently employs over 100 researchers, post-docs, graduate students, and support staff. The main […]
Made in Germany – Information Retrieval Research in Regensburg
These are heady times for the German IR community. Norbert Fuhr’s recent winning of the Salton Prize not only rewarded a fantastic and long-term individual contribution to the field, but has also served to shed light on the whole IR scene in Germany – a fact underlined by this “Made in Germany” series. There are […]
Events Spring 2013
Forthcoming Events Edited By Andy MacFarlane Conferences/Workshops WIMS’13: International Conference on Web Intelligence, Mining and Semantics. Of interest to members working in the area web search, information extract etc. Madrid, Spain, 12-14 June 2013. http://aida.ii.uam.es/wims13/ NAACL-HLT 2013: 14th Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Of interest to members […]

Editorial
Fed up with the snow? Tired of writing SIGIR papers? No exam papers to mark? Then why not take a glass of whisky, sit by the fire and read this new issue of Informer … We have prepared quite a mix of articles this time. We start with an idea that the older readers will remember. […]

IR Made In Germany – The German IR Special Interest Group
Introduction – IR Made In Germany 2012 marked an exciting year for the German Information Retrieval community, when for the first time ever with Norbert Fuhr a German was awarded the prestigious Gerard Salton Award. Besides being a well-deserved personal award, this brings with it a nice appreciation of the work performed by the German […]
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