Editorial

A local habit in Dublin: celebrating Student's t-test

… 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 MMM and COLING coming up soon. Needless to say that SIGIR was successful. My personal highlight this time was the live experiment by Ronny Kohavi (Microsoft) involving the audience in the Industry Track. It illustrated nicely once more how intuitive thinking can be very misleading and that there is no alternative to involving real users in real experiments. You can find a summary of SIGIR written by Ronan Cummins in this edition of Informer.

ICTIR 2013 was the next major IR event this summer which was held in Copenhagen, and we give you a summary of the conference nicely written up by Ingo Frommholz. One of the interesting discussions at the end of the conference was to explore where ICTIR should be heading. We will keep you posted about this.

Another major event in the world of information retrieval was the official retiring of Stephen Robertson who has been a key figure in IR for a very long time. If you have not met Stephen in person yet, then rest assured that he is one of the nicest persons around, so let us celebrate his retirement and wish him all the best (he will still be around!)

This time we also have another article by Tony Russell-Rose on faceted search where he explains that faceted search is not the solution to all your search problems (if you have followed Tony’s articles, then you will be quite an expert on search experience by now!)

Last but not least you will as always find a list of IR-related events coming up in the next few months compiled by Andy MacFarlane.

What else is there without us covering it by an article? Search Solutions 2013 is on the agenda in November with another top line-up this year. We also have a bigger tutorial programme than last year with topics ranging from patent search in Asia to city search. ECIR 2014 is also soon coming up (if you were planning to submit something but have missed the deadlines, then there are still a number of workshops to choose from).

Now we hope you enjoy reading what we have compiled for you this time. If you have any suggestions or would like to contribute to future editions of Informer, then do let us know!

P.S.: ECIR 2015 will be held in Vienna! We received three very strong proposals but in the end the Technical University of Vienna emerged as the winning bidder.