Editorial
Welcome back! Now that the summer has finally disappeared and rain is replaced by darkness, we would like to keep you posted on what’s been going on in the world of search. We are a little earlier this time with our Autumn issue of Informer as we want to make sure you hit two important deadlines. […]
Search Solutions 2017: final programme
SEARCH SOLUTIONS 2017 Wednesday 29th November BCS London HQ, Covent Garden *** Early Bird Registration ends October 31st*** Search Solutions is the premier UK forum for presentation of the latest innovations in search and information retrieval. In contrast to other major industry events, Search Solutions aims to be highly interactive, with attendance strictly limited. The […]
SIGIR 2017: Typhoon, Earthquake, and Godzillas
The International ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) was held in the land of rising sun for its 40th meeting. The conference was hosted at Keio Plaza Hotel in Shinjuku, Tokyo and ran from Monday the 7th until Friday the11th of August. Keio Plaza is a 47-story building located in the […]
BCS Search Industry Awards 2017: final call for nominations
As October draws to a close don’t forget that nominations for the 2017 BCS Search Industry Awards close on November 1st. So if you’re thinking of applying, or nominating someone, now is the time to submit your application. Further details below. See you at the awards ceremony!
Call for Nominations: IRSG Committee
The British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group seeks nominations from members of the group to serve on the committee for a two year term from November 2017. The committee oversees the work of the officers of the group and takes decisions on a number of important matters including the location of ECIR, allocating funds […]
Events – autumn 2017
One Day Events Search Solutions 2017. The annual practioner focused event for the IRSG held at the BCS offices in Covent Garden, together with a tutorial day on 28 November 2017, with the main event on 29th November 2017. http://irsg.bcs.org/SearchSolutions/2017/sse2017.php Conferences/Workshops ISM2017: 19th IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia. Of interest to members working in the […]
Editorial
Welcome to the summer 2017 issue of Informer! It is always such a pleasure to be reminded by you, our readership, that it is time for a new compilation of stories from the world of search and information retrieval, in fact more like two worlds — the one that practitioners operate in and the academic […]
BCS Search Industry Awards 2017
As you may recall, last year we launched the inaugural Search Industry Awards programme, which attracted nominations from across the globe and culminated in a memorable awards ceremony at Search Solutions 2016. My colleagues and I are delighted therefore to launch this year’s Search Industry Awards, celebrating the best search innovations of 2017. Presented by […]
Using Games and Gamification for Natural Language Processing (Games4NLP)
Games4NLP was an independent symposium co-located with the 15th European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) Conference that took place on 4 April 2017 in Valencia, Spain. The symposium aimed to promote and explore the possibilities for research and practical applications of using games and gamification for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The main […]
7th Italian Information Retrieval (IIR) Workshop
The aim of the Italian Information Retrieval (IIR) workshop is to provide an annual meeting where Italian researchers, and especially early stage researchers like PhD students, of the area of IR and related disciplines can present ongoing works and projects as well as results and innovative developments, and exchange information and ideas in an informal […]
Making sense of data at Taxonomy Boot Camp London
17-18 October 2017, Olympia London 25% discount for BCS-IRSG members Last year’s inaugural Taxonomy Bootcamp London (TBCL) was a terrific success as taxonomy people from dozens of countries came together to share their stories and experiences. Now we’re doing it all over again. This year’s conference is all about showcasing the best ideas from the […]
IRSG Support for Events
The BCS IRSG can support events in four different ways: We can provide Sponsorship. We can provide financial support for suitable IR-related events. There are restrictions on how our money can be used due to the status of our parent body, the British Computer Society, as a British Registered Charity. For example, we can provide […]
Events Summer 2017
One Day Events Search Solutions 2017. The annual practioner focused event for the IRSG held at the BCS offices in Covent Garden, together with a tutorial day on 28 November 2017, with the main event on 29th November 2017.
Editorial
Welcome to a new edition of Informer! It’s Spring 2017 and you are reading the official newsletter of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group. What an honour to have YOU as our readership. Let’s jump straight in: we did introduce an important change this time. We
ECIR 2017 conference review
For its 39th edition, the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR) returned, after 20 years, to Aberdeen, Scotland. The conference was organized by the School of Computing Science and Digital Media at Robert Gordon University (RGU) and took place in two separate venues: tutorials and workshops were held at RGU’s Garthdee campus, while the main […]
Call for Book Reviews (Spring 2017)
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 […]
Book review: Deep Text by Tom Reamy
When I started the London Text Analytics meetup group some seven years ago, ‘text analytics’ was a term used by few, and understood by even fewer. Apart from a handful of enthusiasts and academics (who preferred the label of “natural language processing” anyway), the field was either overlooked or ignored by most people. Even the […]
ECIR 2017 Industry Day Review
The tradition of closing out ECIR with industry day continued for its 11th year in Aberdeen, Scotland. This year’s event was co-organized and moderated by Udo Kruschwitz and Tony Russell-Rose. For those who made the trip up north, a potpourri of exciting applications of academic research in IR and NLP was presented, including event detection […]
Events Spring 2017
One Day Events Search Solutions 2017. The annual practioner focused event for the IRSG held at the BCS offices in Covent Garden, together with a tutorial day on 28 November 2017, with the main event on 29th November 2017. Conferences/Workshops Healthcare’17: 2017 International Conference on Healthcare Science and Engineering. Of interest to members working in […]
Editorial
Welcome and Happy New Year! “We had a great 2016. 2017 will prove to be even better” as an anonymous letter writer assures me … although he/she/it also assures me that the European Union is doomed and that I should respect the democratic will of the British people. What better way to start the year […]
A Case for Satellite Events in Evaluation Campaigns
Local conferences, such as TREC in North America, CLEF in Europe, and NTCIR in Asia, play a leading role in promoting information retrieval research by supporting novel campaigns and releasing datasets to share the latest research challenges. To gain access to these datasets, participants are requested to communicate their work in the form of working […]
A framework for chatbot evaluation
Unless you’ve been on another planet for the last year or so, you‘ll almost certainly have noticed that chatbots (and conversational agents in general) became quite popular during the course of 2016. It seems that every day a new start up or bot framework was launched, no doubt fuelled at least in part by a […]
Search Solutions 2016 – Matching the IR talent supply and demand in the industry
This past November 30th 2016, the British Computer Society hosted the Search Solutions forum at its London Offices. It was divided into 5 sessions with the following themes: 1. Understanding users and context, 2. Moving towards question-answering, 3. Beyond web search, 4. New modes of search, and 5. Panel session. Particularly interesting, was the panel […]
Call for Industry Day Proposals at ECIR 2017
This year’s ECIR conference will include an Industry Day, following very successful events at ECIR in recent years. The Industry Day will be held on Thursday 13th April 2017, immediately after the regular conference program. The Industry Day’s objectives are three-fold. The first objective is to present the state of the art in search and […]
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