“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 hear from the membership of the IRSG what we should or shouldn’t focus on in future. Get in touch and we will see what we can do. Welcome to the Winter 2014 edition of Informer!
Melancholy is a state of happiness: Kristian Norling at Search Solutions 2013
What’s coming up this year? Well, let’s first reflect on 2013 for a bit. The IRSG was involved in a range of events that aimed at both academics as well as practitioners. In November we had yet another Search Solutions event. This is now a well-established annual conference and if you want to have a glimpse at what variety of speakers we had over the years, then you will find a Hall of Fame of speakers in the proceedings we placed online alongside the presentations of the individual speakers, and by the way, we also have a review of Search Solutions 2013 in this edition of Informer written up by Silviu Paun and Stuart James. Search Solutions was, as usual, followed by the IRSG AGM, and if you want to know who made it into the IRSG committee, then check out the minutes … or in fact our Web pages.
That’s enough reflection, time to look ahead. We are again looking at an event-packed year. ECIR 2014 is coming up soon in Amsterdam. One of the major highlights will be the invited talk by the the winner of this year’s Karen Spärck-Jones Award. And the winner is … Eugene Agichtein. Congratulations! There was very stiff competition indeed this year. But there is more to ECIR, let me just say: there is still (some) time to submit your papers to the ECIR workshops. If you are a bit of a gamer, why not submit something to the Gamification workshop?
There is more to come this year including the academic highlights of the year such as SIGIR 2014, IiiX 2014, CLEF 2014 … You are more of a practitioner? Well, Enterprise Search Europe is also on the agenda and we even have a preview by Kat Allen included in this edition of Informer. As usual, our events editor Andy provides you with a detailed breakdown of events that may be of interest to you.
Now, what would we do without Tyler’s insights into how people search or try to find information and how to address this in practical applications? This is your last chance to learn more about information wayfinding, the third and final part in his mini-series and it finishes off with a question, which, if you have followed his articles and adopted his wisdom, should be answered with Yes!
Finally, we have a short piece that could actually be the starting point of a new series of articles entitled “Who are those IRSG committee members and what do they do when they are not in the pub?” Here we give you a roundup of Stefan Rueger’s Multimedia IR tutorials and if you are interested in finding out more about the other committee members, then please let us know and that takes us nicely back to Tony’s opening article …
Have a nice winter!
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