In this issue
It has taken me a couple of years to realise that I have never actually written an editorial because when I took over from Udo Kruschwitz I decided to give you a summary of the contents of the issue. So the section has been renamed as ‘In this issue’ and you have no idea how […]
BCS Search Industry Awards 2021
We are delighted to announce this year’s Search Industry Awards, celebrating the best search innovations of 2021. Presented by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the BCS, these awards recognize people, projects, and organizations that have excelled in the design of search and information retrieval products and services. If you know of any people, projects, […]
ECIR 2022 / ECIR 2023
The 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval will take place from 10-14 April 2022 in Stavanger, Norway. The web site is now up, highlighting that this will be the most northerly ECIR ever. If you are planning your 2023 vacation then you may like to know that ECIR 2023 will returning to Dublin, the venue […]
Fairness and Bias in Information Retrieval Glasgow 23 March 2021
2020 was a notable year in information retrieval research and development. First there was the realization that AI applications were going to need a level of transparency that would reassure customers that they were supporting, not controlling, the search process. Second there was the realization that the search community had a responsibility to think beyond […]
ECIR 2021 Conference Supplement
ECIR 2021 was an outstanding event from every perspective. In this first-ever Supplement you will find An overview of the event Some notes on the keynote papers (including the Karen Spark Jones lecture) with links to the videos of the presentations A list of the Award Winners A report on an important panel session on […]
ECIR 2021 Conference overview
Raffaele Perego and Fabrizio Sebastiani are in the process of writing a full report on the conference for SIGIR Forum, and have kindly provided a short reflection for Informer that illustrates the scale, breadth and success of the event, with some notes on the technology platforms.
ECIR 2021 Keynote presentations
There were three keynote presentations at ECIR 2021, carefully scheduled for the end of the day for the benefit of participants in North and South America and early risers in the Asia-Pacific region. I’m not going to try to summarise the talks in any depth but hopefully I will encourage you to sit down with […]
Karen Spark Jones Award 2020 and Lecture
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. Karen was Professor Emerita of Computers and Information at the University of Cambridge and one of the most remarkable and influential women in computer science.
ECIR 2021 Awards
A list of the Award winners is given below
ECIR 2021 – Discussion Panel on Open Access
On 31 March 2021, the Wednesday morning of ECIR 2021, the conference participants joined with seven panellists in a discussion on Open Access and Information Retrieval (IR), or more accurately, on the lack of open access publishing in IR. Discussion topics included the experience of researchers with open access in Africa; business models for open […]
Another BIR Please — Report of the 11th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval
The 11th Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval Workshop (BIR 2021) was held online on April 1st, 2021, at ECIR 2021 as virtual event only for the 2nd time due to the pandemic situation. As before, the aim of the interdisciplinary BIR workshop series is to bring together researchers from different communities, especially scientometrics/bibliometrics and information retrieval. In […]
ECIR 2021 – Cooking Class with Chef Paolo Monti
What can a conference organiser offer to virtual participants as a social programme? The brilliant solution from the ECIR team was to offer two cookery classes from the most renowned chef in Lucca. You can watch the demonstrations and download the recipes from the web site.
The BIRDS were flying again – Bridging Gaps at CHIIR 2021
Can Data Science, Information Science, Information Retrieval and Human-Computer Interaction get together and learn from each other? Bringing together these different communities is the aim of the BIRDS workshop. While in Information Retrieval we learnt over the last decades how to meld user- and system-oriented approaches, one of the questions is how we can make […]
Thinking about information behaviour – Professor Tom Wilson
Each year the UK Electronic Information Group, a special interest group of CILIP, makes the Farradane Award. The Award honours Jason Farradane, who first made an impact on the LIS community with a paper on the ‘scientific approach to documentation’ presented at a Royal Society Scientific Information Conference in 1948. He was instrumental in establishing […]
Book Review Information Behaviour by Tom Wilson
Nowadays we are very familiar with information retrieval, interactive information retrieval, information risk and information management but information behaviour (not information behaviours – as Tom Wilson emphasizes in this book) is rarely discussed even though thanks to Luciano Floridi we have a good understanding of the philosophy of information. There is now no excuse for […]
Paul Cleverley’s presentation to Search Solutions 2020 has now been published
At Search Solutions 2020 Paul Cleverley presented a paper on the research he had carried out with Fionualla Cousins and Simon Burnett on the search patterns for Covid-19 within a very large oil and gas company during the initial stages of the lockdown in early 2020. Paul was not able to share his presentation slides […]
Search Insights 2021 is now available
Since 2018 The Search Network has been publishing an annual Search Insights report which is a set of short essays on a wide range of issues broadly (but not totally) related to enterprise search. Search Insights 2021 can be downloaded free-of-charge, and with no requirement to register, from the web site of The Search Network. […]
Open source search and OpenSearch
At the beginning of 2021 ElasticSearch took the open source search community by surprise when it announced some changes to its licensing model and subsequently highlighted the differences between the ElasticSearch and AWS offerings. Charlie Hull, Managing Consultant at Open Source Solutions, has been tracking the outcomes of this decision, and very courageously set up […]
Events Spring 2021
Note: Due to the COVID-19 crisis some events have been cancelled, postponed or will be run virtually. We have provided information on each of the events with the current status at the time of writing. Please check the URL of the event for further details.
IRSG Committee Meeting Highlights (January 26 2021)
Greetings all. As your acting IRSG secretary, I am pleased to kick off the inaugural update from the most recent IRSG committee meeting. This will be a very brief piece highlighting key points from the meeting. Our last meeting IRSG committee meeting took place on January 26th 2021. Key action points from this meeting were
And finally!
And finally! As a way of keeping in touch with information retrieval research during the lock down I started to look at some sections of arXiv on a regular basis. After a few months I homed in on the following sections as being the most fruitful. Artificial Intelligence authors/titles recent submissions (arxiv.org) Computation and Language […]
Search Solutions 2021 23-24 November.
A conference committee has been set up for this meeting. Since this was my suggestion I’ve ended up being the Chair. The other members are Tony Russell-Rose, Charlie Hull, Ingo Frommholz and Haiming Liu. We are anticipating that the conference will take place on 24 November with tutorials on 23 November. These dates have been […]
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