Editorial
Welcome to the Autumn 2016 edition of Informer! It’s been a busy few months and as you can see we waited until the election period was over before going live so that we can now officially confirm (hot off the press) that Stefan Rüger is the new chair of the IRSG. Stefan brings in many years […]
Review of Taxonomy Boot Camp, London, Oct 2016
The first ever Taxonomy Boot Camp (TBC) this side of the Atlantic took place in London on 18th and 19th October 2016 at Kensington Olympia, organized by Information Today Ltd. As I have attended and presented at Taxonomy Boot Camp in the U.S. several times, I was keen to see what the first TBC in […]
Deep Learning In the News – Digest
It seems you can’t go very far these days without hearing something about Deep Learning. Here is a quick digest of some of the recent Deep Learning news and blog posts and a couple of pointers to potentially useful resources. This compilation was made possible thanks to Lumi News AI. Articles in this digest appeared […]
Searching for talent: the IR challenges of recruitment professionals (part 3)
And finally… here’s the third installment of my trilogy of posts on the information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals. The background to this (in case you missed the previous two) is that a few months ago I published a post describing our InnovateUK-funded research project investigating professional search strategies in the workplace. As you may […]
Conference Review: Autumn School for Information Retrieval and Foraging 2016
This year, following a series of successful editions, Leibniz Centre for Informatics at Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany has, yet again, hosted The Autumn School for Information Retrieval and Information Foraging (ASIRF). The event took place from the 3rd till the 8th October 2016 and was co-organised by The University of Hildesheim. The ASIRF 2016 attracted […]
Events Autumn 2016
One Day Events Search Solutions 2016. The annual practioner focused event for the IRSG held at the BCS offices in Covent Garden, together with a tutorial day. 29-30 November 2016. http://irsg.bcs.org/SearchSolutions/2016/sse2016.php Conferences/Workshops ISS 2016: ACM Interactive Surfaces and Spaces. Of interest to members working in the area of alternative interfaces search. 6-9 November 2016, Niagara […]
Editorial
Are we late for the summer edition? We don’t think so, as the summer is still in full swing. It’s difficult even to recall what a non-summer day looks like. Rain? Snow? Never seen … Welcome back to Informer! Let’s be purely factual this time to get you straight to the content. Take-home message number […]
The IRSG Search Industry Awards
As you may know, for many years the IRSG has awarded prizes to its members in various forms, e.g. the Karen Sparck Jones award, best paper at ECIR, etc. These awards help create a sense of community and provide recognition to individual members for their work. However, the current awards programme is aimed almost exclusively […]
Conference Review: SIGIR 2016
The International ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) returned to Pisa after 30 years for its 39th meeting. The conference was hosted in the Palazzo dei Congressi, a fantastic conference space just east of the centre of Pisa, alongside the river Arno. Organised by General Chairs Raffaele Perego and Fabrizio Sebastiani, […]
Third International Workshop on Gamification in Information Retrieval (GamifIR’16)
The 3rd Gamification in Information Retrieval (GamifIR 2016) Workshop, hosted at SIGIR 2016, started off with a highly insightful and timely keynote by Sebastian Deterding. Sebastian is a senior research fellow at the Digital Creativity Labs at the University of York, a founder and principal designer of the design agency coding conduct, a founder of […]
Searching for talent: The information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals (part 2)
A while ago I published a post describing our InnovateUK-funded research project investigating professional search strategies in the workplace. As you may recall, we surveyed a number of professions, and the one we analyzed first was (cue drum roll)… recruitment professionals. It’s a profession that information retrieval researchers haven’t traditionally given much thought to (myself […]
Book Review: Social Network-Based Recommender Systems
ISBN: 978-3-319-22734-4 (print) – 978-3-319-22735-1 (digital) Daniel Schall’s book presents a series of experiments in the scope of social network-based recommender systems. Our daily life increasingly involves interacting with digital social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and GitHub. Their complexity impedes deciding whom to add as a friend, expert, coworker, or collaborator. The book […]
Events Summer 2016
One Day Events Search Solutions 2016. The annual practioner focused event for the IRSG held at the BCS offices in Covent Garden, together with a tutorial day. 29-30 November 2016. http://irsg.bcs.org/SearchSolutions/2016/sse2016.php Conferences/Workshops ISMW FRUCT 2016 conference on Intelligence, Social Media and Web. Of interest to members working in the area of social search or web […]
Editorial
Welcome to the Spring 2016 edition of Informer! We know we are a bit late this time but we wanted to find out how eagerly people are awaiting our next issue (not quite an A/B test but close enough) and yes, the readers’ response was overwhelming and we promise not to delay the delivery of […]
Conference Review: ECIR 2016
The 38th European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR), after 9 years of absence from Italy, comes back to Padua with an exceptional organisation made by the department of Electronic Engineering of the University of Padua, which did not disappoint any expectation. Padua, the learned Padua, gem of beauty and wisdom, is a city that stands […]
Searching for talent: The information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals (part 1)
A few months ago I published a post describing our InnovateUK research project investigating professional search strategies in the workplace. I’m pleased to say that the project has now completed, and we are currently analyzing the results. As you may recall, we surveyed a number of professions, and the one we examined first is (cue […]
First International Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval (NewsIR’16)
The First International Workshop on Recent Trends in News Information Retrieval (NewsIR’16) was held as part of the ECIR 2016 conference in Padua (Italy) on 20 March 2016. The workshop provided an opportunity for a diverse group of stakeholders—researchers, professionals and practitioners—involved in news-related information to come together and discuss the latest and most powerful uses of […]
Events Spring 2016
One Day Events FINREC 2016: 2nd International Workshop on Personalization & Recommender Systems in Financial Services. Of interest to members working in the area of either personalisation or recommender systems for search. 16th June 2016. Bari, Italy. https://finrec2016.wordpress.com/ Conferences/Workshops SDM’16: THE 16th SIAM International conference on Data Mining. Of interest to members working in the […]
Editorial
Welcome to our winter 2016 edition of Informer! Another year has passed and we are now in the fifth year of our relaunched newsletter. Time for a review? No way, but perhaps you tell us what you think so far. What’s new this time? Many new contributors for a start…
The Future of Search – Search Solutions Conference 26th November 2015
Search Solutions 2015 took place at the British Computer Society (BCS) Headquarters at Southampton Street in Covent Garden, London, UK. The event was jointly convened with the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO). The event was a sell out with over 80 attendees from business and academia. The two sessions in the morning were focused […]
My first attendance at Search Solutions
As a PhD student just reaching the end of my first year at the Centre for Vision Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at the University of Surrey, I was delighted to receive a postgraduate bursary from the British Computer Society IRSG to support my attendance at Search Solutions 2015. Search Solutions was an ideal opportunity […]
News Digest in Machine Learning
Machine Learning (ML) is continuing to be a hot topic in industry with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo headlining in recent news. Here is a quick digest of some of the recent exciting events in ML and a couple of pointers to potentially useful ML resources. In A Huge Breakthrough, Google’s AI Beats A Top […]
Book Review: Fundamentals of Predictive Text Mining 2nd ed (2015)
Book Review: Weiss S. M., Indurkhya N. and Zhang T. (2015). Fundamentals of Predictive Text Mining. Springer-Verlag, London. Second Edition The volume “Fundamentals of Predictive Text Mining”, 2nd ed. has nine chapters, a table of contents, a list of references, a Subject Index and an Author Index. The book also includes a Preface written by […]
SocialSensor: Sensing political content in social media streams
The successful use of online material in political campaigns over the past two decades has motived the inclusion of social network websites—such as Twitter—as an integral part of the political apparatus. Indeed, after the growth of candidate websites in 1996, Jesse Ventura’s e-mail campaign in 1998, the online fund-raising for John McCain’s campaign in 2000, […]
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