In the Winter issue
November 2021 was a very busy time for IRSG. The Search Solutions Conference took place virtually on 24 November. You can read reports on the conference and on the two tutorials in this issue. There is also a list of the BCS Search Industry Awards that were announced at the Conference. Continuing the ‘awards’ theme […]
From Udo Kruschwitz – BCS IRSG Chairman
Happy New Year everybody! It is a pleasure for me to contribute a few words in my role as chair of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group. This is my second year of term, and we are looking back at another turbulent year — who would have thought that in autumn 2021 we would have […]
Search Solutions 2021 – conference report
Looking back at the ten papers and two panel discussions at the BCS IRSG Search Solutions 2021 conference in November there was a very strong theme that emerged with most of the papers providing a set of variations. The theme at its most basic was that ‘one size does not fit all’, especially when it comes […]
Search Solutions 2021 – Tutorials report
As has been the custom, the main Search Solutions 2021 event has again been preceded by a day of tutorials. Two tutorials were successfully delivered on the day: an introduction to Natural Language Processing and a “Practitioners’ Evaluation Roundtable” (which was not a tutorial in the strict sense). Haiming Liu, Ingo Frommholz and Jochen Leidner […]
BCS Search Industry Awards 2021
At the BCS IRSG Search Solutions 2021 Conference on 24 November there was a session during which the BCS Search Industry Awards for 2021 were presented by Tony Russell-Rose on behalf of the IRSG Committee. The Conference was once again (and hopefully for the last time!) virtual so there was no opportunity to applaud the winners. This year there […]
Microsoft-BCS/BCS-IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award 2021 for Dr Ivan Vulić
Dr Ivan Vulić from the University of Cambridge has been named as the winner of the Microsoft-BCS/BCS-IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award 2021 The award, which is sponsored by Microsoft Research, was created in 2008 to remember Professor Karen Spärck Jones FBA, a leading researcher in information retrieval at what was at the time called the […]
Strix Lecture 2021 – 9 December 2021
The annual Tony Kent Strix Annual Memorial Lecture was held on December 9th. The lecture was given by the 2020 Strix Award winner Ian Ruthven (Professor, University of Strahtclyde). He delivered his journey of research over the past 20 years where attendees learned that many of his contributions were through collaborative efforts with many researchers […]
IRSG 2021-2022 AGM Committee Elections
The IRSG Annual General Meeting (AGM) took place immediately after Search Solutions 2021, where the committee election results were announced. The full list of current committee members is now available on the IRSG governance page. Incoming committee members are Tony Russell-Rose (Vice-Chair), Graham McDonald (Ordinary Committee Member) and Annalina Caputo (ECIR 2023 Committee Member). Existing […]
ECIR 2022 10-14 April – the latest news
The 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’22) will be held in Stavanger, Norway, between April 10 and 14, 2022. It will be the northern-most location in the history of ECIR, with the Norwegian fjord region offering some of the most majestic and spectacular scenery in the world. With its intimate and mostly pedestrian centre, […]
Exploring Information Retrieval – A series of eight ISKO UK / BCS IRSG IR workshops
Following requests from attendees to the ISKO UK KO-ED classes (part of the programme Knowledge Organization Education) ISKO UK ran two workshops in the Autumn: the first one on vocabulary control with Sylvie Davis and the second one on the UDC with Aida Slavic. The last of the three workshops “Practical Thesaurus Construction” with Stella […]
At last – an academic deep dive into an enterprise search case study
The opening presentation at Search Solutions 2021 in November given by Professor Katriina Byström (Oslo Metropolitan University) in which she summarised the outcomes of research she had carried out with Professor Marianne Lykke, Ann Bygholm and Louise Bak Søndergaard ( Department of Communications and Psychology at Aalborg University) on enterprise search use across an organisation. […]
Brief Overview of the Portable Document Format (PDF) and Some Challenges for Text Extraction
(Note from the Editor PDF files are so ubiquitous in business and in academia that few people give any thought to the problems that arise in extracting text from a PDF to incorporate into a search index. Tim Allison is a consultant working at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and has been at the forefront […]
Book review – Invisible Search and Online Search Engines
(A note from the Editor. This 161pp book was published in 2019 but recently became open access. I must have missed it first time around!) The reviewer Cass Zhixue Zhao I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield. I have obtained my PhD from Information School, University of Sheffield. […]
Events Spring 2022
Note: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic 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.
ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2022
The annual ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) is the primary international event for the inter- and multi-disciplinary community of academics and practitioners in digital libraries coming from computer, information and social sciences, and other related disciplines such as information retrieval. JCDL encompasses the many meanings of the term digital libraries, including notions of […]
And finally….from the Editor
During the closing panel session of the Search Solutions conference in November Professor Iadh Ounis (University of Glasgow) highlighted the need to keep graduate and undergraduate courses updated in line with the very rapid developments in IR theory, development and practice. Around this time there was a Twitter thread about what might be the best […]
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