Editorial
At the AGM (held during the TALMIRI conference in September) I set out an editorial policy for Informer. “My overall aim to balance academic and practitioner interests, and to present developments and achievements in as broad a range as possible of search applications. In doing so I hope that Informer will increase the membership and […]
Search Solutions conference and workshops London 25/26 November
At the time of writing the confirmed speakers are Ryan Mcdonald (Google), Matteo Venanzi (Microsoft), Allan Hanbury (contextflow and TU Wien), Nicolas Fiorini (Doctrine), Andreas Kaltenbrunner (NTENT) and Benjamin Braasch (Raytion). This year the event will be held in the new location of the BCS in Moorgate. There will also be a day of tutorials […]
Diagnosing Enterprise Search
As a digital workplace consultant, I often find myself in workshops with employees to gather requirements. Invariably within a few minutes someone will say “we can never find stuff, the search is awful”, and the whole group will nod agreement. My company, ClearBox Consulting, has been working in the intranet and digital workplace space since […]
Sheffield Information Retrieval Research Group
The Sheffield Information Retrieval Research Group is one of seven research groups of the Information School of The University of Sheffield. Research on information retrieval in Sheffield goes back as far as the 1960’s. Examples of research themes worked on over the years include the indexing and retrieval ofchemical structures (Michael Lynch), document clustering (Peter […]
The Open University at 50: a research profile
(A note from the Editor. From 2006-2008 I worked with an outstanding team (Ian Roddis, Nicky Waters and Jed Cawthorne) on the development of a new intranet and the selection of a new search application. In the course of the user interviews I realized my view of The Open University as just a distance-learning provider […]
Book Review: Information Retrieval: The Early Years
It’s time to make space on your book shelf again, as this year, quite a few interesting IR books have been published. This is a brief review on one of them: “Information Retrieval: The Early Years“, written by Donna Harman. Harman can rightly be described as one of the pioneers of IR who has influenced […]
Karen Spärk Jones Lecture and Award – a clarification
I have to admit that I was very confused about the relationship between the Lecture and the Award before realizing that there was no relationship other than the name of the honouree. This year the 2019 Karen Spärk Jones Lecture will be given by Professor Mirella Lapata, University of Edinburgh on Wednesday 23 October 2019 […]
TALMIRI Conference 18 September 2019 – conference report
The 2019 TALMIRI Conference took place at the Putterbury campus of the University of Bedfordshire. The acronym stands for Talent Meets the Information Retrieval Industry. The conference was conceived and organized by Ingo Frommholz and Haiming Liu with support from the University of Bedfordshire that enabled the conference to be free to attendees in a […]
Strix Memorial Lecture London 29 November 2019
The Strix Award is presented by the UK electronic information Group (UKeiG), in partnership with the International Society for Knowledge Organization UK (ISKO UK), the Royal Society of Chemistry Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group (RSC CICAG) and the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG). The Award is given in recognition of […]
SIGIR Forum July 2019 issue
The July issue of SIGIR Forum is now available, and you do not have to be a member of ACM to read it. SIGIR Forum is published twice a year and usually has good summaries of recent ACM meetings. This issue contains, amongst other items, a report on the CHIIR 2019 Second Workshop on Evaluation […]
Events: Autumn
One Day Events Search Solutions 2019: Out annual practitioner focused get together held on 25th and 26th November 2019. Tutorials are held on the 25th and the main event is on the 26th. A date for your diary! https://irsg.bcs.org/SearchSolutions/2019/sse2019.php DIR2019: Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop 2019. A one day workshop on search. Amsterdam, Netherlands. 29 November […]
ECIR 2020 Lisbon 14-17 April 2020
The 42nd European Conference on Information Retrieval will be held in Lisbon on 14-17 April 2020. Lisbon is one of my favourite European capitals; if you have not visited the city ECIR 2020 would be a very good justification for doing so! There is still time to offer a contribution in many of the categories […]
ESSIR 2019 & FDIA Student Review
In its 12th edition, the European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR) returned to its Italian roots in beautiful Milan, where it took place at the University of Milano-Bicocca between July 15th to July 19th, 2019. Maristella Agosti (University of Padua), who was organizer of the first summer school back in 1990, again co-organized the […]
And finally….
The seminal paper on the double-helix structure for DNA by Crick and Watson ends up with the statement “It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material”. A masterpiece of understatement. At the end of a research paper there is always […]
Summer 2019 Editorial
The centrepiece of this issue is a profile of the IR research and teaching activities of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Glasgow. This is the first of what I plan to be a series of profiles of university departments with a strong IR/search focus. Initially these will be UK departments but […]
IRSG Forthcoming events
18 September TALMIRI – Talent meets IR Industry, Bedford TALMIRI is a new initiative for IRSG to complement the annual Search Solutions conference. It will be one-day symposium with the purpose of bringing together young and senior researchers and practitioners from industry on topics related to search and information retrieval. The objective is to awareness […]
Awards
Awards open for nominations Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award – nominations close on 12 September The British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the BCS created an award in 2008 to commemorate the achievements of Karen Spärck Jones. The Award is sponsored by Microsoft Research. For more information […]
Conference reports
ISKO 2019 Meeting The Human Position in an Artificial World: creativity, ethics and AI in knowledge organization ISKO UK’s sixth biennial conference was held at City, University of London on 15-16th July 2019 and was attended by 75 participants from 14 countries. David Haynes, Chairman of ISKOUK has kindly provided this summary of the meeting […]
Events: Summer
One Day Events Search Solutions 2019: Out annual practitioner focused get together held on 25th and 26th November 2019. Tutorials are held on the 25th and the main event is on the 26th. A date for your diary! Conferences/Workshops EPIA’2019: 18th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Includes a number of themes including a track TEMA’19: […]
Profile: Glasgow Information Retrieval Group
The Glasgow Information Retrieval Group within the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow was founded 32 years ago in 1986 by Professor C. J. ‘Keith’ van Rijsbergen, often considered one of the founders of modern Information Retrieval (IR). From its outset, the Glasgow IR group has focused on improving the effectiveness of […]
Syria’s First Web Search Engine: An Interview with Shadi Saleh
This interview was conducted by on Saturday, July 13, 2019 (editing for brevity and language jointly by the interviewer and interviewee.) Jochen Leidner: Today, I have on the line Shadi Saleh, co-founder of the first-ever Web search engine in Syria. I met Shadi at ECIR 2019 [the 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval] in Cologne, […]
Advances in Search: Trip Report from ECIR 2019 (Cologne, April 2019)
by Jochen L. Leidner and Ingo Frommholz SIGIR 2019 in Paris in July. This is a report of some of the highlights of ECIR this year with no claims of representativeness. Part I – Impressions and general Trends Search is alive and happy as a field of research. Both theoretical and applied papers were presented, […]
And finally…
I was delighted to note that Donna Harman has contributed a paper entitled Information Retrieval: the early years to the Now Publishing Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/Details/INR-065. It is easy to focus on the future and not appreciate the long history of the development of information retrieval. Many of the core elements of […]
Editorial
It is an honour to have been appointed as Editor of Informer in succession to Udo Kruschwitz. The first time I saw a real-time computer-based search service was at 10am on 23 February 1976. If you are wondering how I can be that precise over forty years later the secret is that at the time […]
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