Editorial
Welcome to the autumn edition of Informer! For those of you who don’t know, Informer is the newsroom of the Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) of the British Computer Society. We spare no effort in getting the hottest pieces of (IRSG) news, getting the best contributors and compiling the most up-to-date list of IR-related events. […]
Mining search logs for usage patterns (pt 2)
In a previous post I discussed some initial investigations into the use of unsupervised learning techniques (i.e. clustering) to identify usage patterns in web search logs. As you may recall, we had some initial success in finding interesting patterns of user behaviour in the AOL log, but when we tried to extend this and replicate […]
Applied Research at the Knowledge Discovery research area of the Know-Center in Graz
The Know-Center is Austria’s leading research centre for data-driven business and big data analytics, with the purpose to bridge the gap between industry and academia. Therefore, the state-of-the-art in science is applied to problem setting within the industry to stir innovation, and to actively research in areas not being covered currently by the research community.
Music Information Retrieval at JKU Linz
The Department of Computational Perception at the Johannes Kepler University Linz was founded in October 2004, with the appointment of Prof. Gerhard Widmer. Its mission is to develop computational models and algorithms that permit computers to perceive and “understand” aspects of the external world, where we interpret “perception” in the widest sense of the word, […]
Book Review: Graph-Based Clustering and Data Visualization Algorithms
Graph-Based Clustering and Data Visualization Algorithms: A review by Song Chen ISBN: 978-1-4471-5157-9 (Print) – 978-1-4471-5158-6 (Online) The book, authored by Ágnes Vathy-Fogarassy and Janos Abonyi presents the topic of graph-based clustering and presents several algorithms. Besides introducing several related methods in representing and clustering a network, the authors also proposed a novel clustering algorithm to […]
Events Autumn 2014
One day events Search Solutions 2014. Our annual one day practioner focused event, with a tutorial day. 26, 27 November 2014. http://irsg.bcs.org/SearchSolutions/2014/sse2014.php
Editorial
Another edition of Informer? Are people not still hotly debating the issues we raised in the spring edition? Well, it’s been three months. Time flies when you are getting old(ish). Welcome back! This time it’s a seriously short editorial. Let’s focus on the facts.
Mining search logs for usage patterns (Part 1)
As I mentioned in a previous post I’ve recently been looking into the challenges of search log analysis and in particular the prospects for deriving a ‘taxonomy of search sessions’. The idea is that if we can find distinct, repeatable patterns of behaviour in search logs then we can use these to better understand user […]
Conference Review: SIGIR 2014
The 37th Annual SIGIR Conference was held at Gold Coast, Australia in July 2014. The conference was chaired by Shlomo Geva and Andrew Trotman and organised with support from QUT, RMIT, The University of Melbourne and The University of Otago. Located at the Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre, the venue was just a 5 […]
Workshop Review: 1st Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) workshop @ ECIR 2014
Organizer of the workshop: Philipp Mayr, Andrea Scharnhorst, Birger Larsen, Philipp Schaer, Peter Mutschke Workshop Website: http://www.gesis.org/en/events/events-archive/conferences/ecirworkshop2014/ Workshop proceedings: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1143/ Participants: 40 The BIR workshop was also informed by an ongoing COST Action TD1210 KnowEscape . The 1st Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR) workshop @ECIR 2014 in Amsterdam (NL) aimed to engage with the IR community […]
2014 Karen Spӓrck Jones Lecture – Wendy Hall
Professor Dame Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton was the 2014 IBM BCS Karen Spӓrck Jones Lecturer. The lecture celebrates the role of women in computing research, and Wendy took the opportunity to present a wide ranging lecture, using her own career as a framework within which to locate the many developments and changes […]
Events Summer 2014
Forthcoming Events Edited By Andy MacFarlane One day events Search Solutions 2014. Our annual one day practioner focused event, with a tutorial day. 26, 27 November 2014. Conferences/Workshops SocialCom 2014: The 7th ASE International Conference on Social Computing. Of interest to members working in the area of social search. 4-7 August 2014, Beijing, China, http://socialcom2014beijing.scienceengineering.org/ […]
Editorial
Welcome to a new edition of Informer and a very short editorial (just to find out if anybody notices). What do we have to offer this time? First of all we have a number of workshop and conference reviews. March saw the annual iConference leaving America for the first time and what better place to […]
Workshop Review: MindTheGap’14
The MindTheGap 2014 full day workshop, held 4 March in conjunction with the iConference at Germany’s Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, aimed to bring together researchers from different domains (including Information Systems, Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Recommender Systems) to discuss the idea of going beyond search as a “single shot”, i.e., an isolated single query, […]
Conference Review: ECIR 2014
The 36th European Conference on IR Research (ECIR2014) was held in the beautiful city of Amsterdam on 13-16 April 2014. With its objective to provide the venue for the presentation and publication of the original research outcome in various domains of Information Retrieval, the conference provided a diverse range of opportunities, i.e., workshops, tutorials, short […]
Workshop Review: GamifIR 2014
The 1st Gamification in Information Retrieval (GamifIR) workshop was held at ECIR 2014 on April 13 in Amsterdam. The workshop focused on the challenges and opportunities that gamification may present for the information retrieval (IR) community. Gamification, which is the application of game elements and mechanics in non-gaming environments with the aim to increase user […]
Towards Search Standardisation
The EU-funded COST Network IC1002 (http://www.mumia-network.eu/ ) is a four year (2010-2014) networking programme which aims to promote collaboration between researchers and professionals working on Multilingual and Multifaceted Information Access (MUMIA), principally in Information Retrieval, Machine Translation and related topics. More than 250 scientists and professionals from 28 COST countries and 4 non COST countries […]
Information Retrieval in Austria
The ECIR will take place in Vienna, Austria in 2015. Leading up to this event, we will have short presentations of some of the IR research groups in Austria in upcoming issues. To begin with, we provide a short overview of the IR landscape in Austria. The Austrian IR community is small, but active, with […]
Call for Book Reviews (Spring 2014)
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 Spring 2014
One day events Making Metadata work. A one day event on meta-data of interest to members working in the area of meta-data and search. A joint event with ISKO UK. 23rd June 2014. BCS offices, 5 Southampton Street, London WC2 7HA. http://www.iskouk.org/events/metadata_June_2014.htm Conferences/Workshops LIDA 2014: Libraries in the Digital Age. Of interest to members working […]
Editorial
“New year, new direction?” asks Tony in his opening piece. Are we going to go back to print editions of Informer? Will we establish a new conference series on Enterprise Search? Are we going to extend our activities to the Outer Hebrides? Well, the short answer is that it’s up to you. We want to […]
New year, new direction?
The start of a new year is always a good time to reflect on the role and impact of groups such as ours, and ask the question ‘ why are we here?’ For many of us on the IRSG committee, the answer is simple: to promote the dissemination of IR knowledge and best practice in […]
Enterprise Search Europe 2014 – Conference Preview
The 4th Enterprise Search Europe conference will take place in London on 29-30 May 2014, chaired by Martin White of Intranet Focus. BCS-IRSG Members can benefit from 20% discount on delegate places. “In developing the programme, our priority is always for delegates to learn from the successes and challenges faced by other search managers,” explains […]
Information Wayfinding, Part 3: Designing for Wayfinding
How can we make ever-growing volumes of information accessible and useful to people without overwhelming them? That is the question I want to consider in this third and final instalment on information wayfinding. In Part 1, I argued that we must move beyond thinking of information interaction as a book of pages, and instead think […]
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