In this issue
The 2023 AGM will take place on the evening of the Tutorial Day (21 November) at Search Solutions. There are a number of vacancies on the Committee going forward into 2024 and IRSG Chairman Udo Kruschwitz encourages candidates to contribute to the development of IRSG over the year ahead. Search Solutions 2023 takes place in […]
2023 AGM and Committee nominations
The BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group invites nominations for the following positions: – Vice Chair – Secretary – Inclusion Officer – Early Careers Advocate – Events Coordinator – 1 ordinary member of the committee Those elected will serve a two-year term commencing from the 2023 AGM which will be held on 21 November 2023 at 1800 London time after the […]
From the BCS IRSG Chair
Welcome back to a new issue of Informer! There is quite a lot happening in our community as you can see when browsing the contents. So let me try to be brief which gives you more time to study the other articles … ECIR is over, ECIR is coming up … the usual cycle. The […]
Search Solutions 2023 – Tutorials London 21 November 2023
Innovations in Search & Information Retrieval. Search Solutions is the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group’s annual event focused on practitioner issues in the arena of search and information retrieval. It is a unique opportunity to bring together academic research and practitioner experience. The Search Solutions event consists of a Tutorial day and a Conference day, […]
Search Solutions 2023 – Conference. London, 22 November 2023
Innovations in Search & Information Retrieval. Search Solutions is the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group’s annual event focused on practitioner issues in the arena of search and information retrieval. It is a unique opportunity to bring together academic research and practitioner experience. The Search Solutions event consists of a Tutorial day and a Conference day, […]
ECIR 2024 Glasgow – a status report
The 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024) will be held in Glasgow, Scotland, 24th-28th March 2024. ECIR is the annual premier European forum for the presentation of new research results in Information Retrieval. ECIR will be held in central Glasgow at the excellent Radisson Blu hotel (actually, Radisson Blu was also the venue […]
KSJ Awards 2023 nominations
A pioneer of information retrieval, the computer science sub-discipline that also underpins the technology of modern Web search engines, Karen Spärck Jones was a British professor of Computers and Information at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge. Her contributions to the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR), especially with regard to […]
Search Insights 2024 London 22 February 2024
The IRSG Committee has accepted a proposal from The Search Network to run a one-day event focused on providing advice for IT managers and search managers seeking to optimise the value of search in their organisations and for customers. The event will be held at the BCS London HQ on 22 February. The programme will […]
1978 and the first search revolution
We are currently struggling to cope with the rapid deployment of new search technologies as though nothing like this has happened before. I get a sense of déjà vu because something quite similar started to take place in 1978 with the arrival of search software on mini-computers. To be sure it took some time for […]
Events listing
One Day Events Search Solutions 2023: The groups annual industry focused event, includes a tutorial day. 21-22 November 2023. https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/member-communities/information-retrieval-specialist-group/conferences-and-events/search-solutions/
FDIA 2023
The Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA) 2023 symposium was held on Friday 1 September 2023 in Vienna, Austria in conjunction with ESSIR 2023 . The purpose of FDIA is to provide Master and PhD students as well as early- career researchers a platform to discuss their research and project ideas with experts in the […]
And very finally….from the Editor
This is my final issue of Informer. I’ve been the curator since taking over from Udo in 2019 and have enjoyed creating and editing the issues, supported by Steve Zimmerman and Tony Russell-Rose who have uploaded the text into a readable format. I’ve already written a substantial article in this issue on what I regard […]
In the April issue
To start with IRSG affairs, our Chairman Udo Kruschwitz comments on some aspects of the very successful ECIR 2023 conference and our Secretary, Steven Zimmerman has an update on Committee Membership following the 2022 AGM held in November following the Search Solutions 2022 event. The ECIR 2023 conference was a great success, and there are […]
The Editor’s in-tray
A small miscellany of search-related items that have arrived in my in-tray recently that you might be interested in Microsoft Search Hero Mastermind Group This is a new and very enterprising training course for Microsoft search managers that has a mix of tuition and mentoring spread out over a three month period. The course has […]
CIKM 2023 Birmingham 21-25 October 2023
The 31st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) will be held in Birmingham on 21-25 October. The last time this conference was held in Europe was 2018! It is not a BCS event but many members of IRSG are involved in the event. The General Chairs are Ingo Frommholz, University of Wolverhampton, […]
Search Solutions 2023 London, 21/22 November
A mark-your-diary item for the annual Search Solutions 2023 conference. It will be held at the BCS London office in Moorgate and will be on-site only. Tuesday 21 will be Tutorials Day and Wednesday 22 will be Conference Day. There will be call for papers and tutorials in early May and this will be posted […]
Karen Spärck Jones (KSJ) Award – 2023 timeline for nominations
Professor Jochen Leidner, the current chair of Karen Spärck Jones (KSJ) Award, presented the trophy to the 2022 KSJ award winner, Professor William Wang, who delivered his keynote presentation at ECIR 2023. Since Jochen has chaired three years of the KSJ Award, and 2022 is the last year of his term I am now the […]
IRSG 2022-2023 AGM and Committee Elections
The IRSG Annual General Meeting (AGM) took place immediately after Search Solutions 2022, where the committee election results were announced. The draft 2021 minutes can be found here, with 2021 AGM confirmed minutes found here. The full list of current committee members is now available on the IRSG governance page. All committee positions were filled […]
Academia and the Enterprise – Steve Zimmerman
Academia and the Enterprise It is an honour to be asked by a highly respected contributor to the enterprise search community to share my journey from academia into the enterprise. Admittedly, it has been an unusual journey, so perhaps it’s best to say a bit about where things are at the exact moment before […]
Alan Turing Institute Conference on LLMs February 2023 – a historical perspective?
This symposium, organized by the Alan Turing Institute, was held at the IET, Savoy Place on 23 February and attracted around 350 delegates, including what seemed to be the entire UK machine learning research community. There were seven presentations and a panel session that I was not able to stay for. (Note from the Editor. Two […]
ECIR 2023 Industry Day
The European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) seems to have emerged from the pandemic stronger than ever. This year, in Dublin, saw the highest number of attendees ever, I’m told, at over 380 in-person and virtual attendees. I’m not a computing academic, so I don’t sit through the academic presentations, but the last day of […]
Call for proposals for IRSG one-day events in 2023
The Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) of the BCS invites proposals for the organisation of one day events supported by BCS. Proposals will be evaluated based on the organisational and financial plans and benefits to the Information Retrieval community. Important dates * Submission deadline for this round: 19-May-2023 * Notification: 02-Jun-2023
Relevance under uncertainty – the commercial realities of IR development
Relevance Under Uncertainty – How Loop54 does software engineering to advance relevance Loop54 (on the market under the name FactFinder Infinity) is a technology that integrates with e-commerce stores and determines based on visitor interactions, in real time, which the most relevant products are for each individual user at every moment. It attempts to perform […]
Tony Kent Strix Award 2022 lectures
The 2022 annual memorial lecture for the International Tony Kent Strix Award hosted by the UK electronic information Group (UKeiG) in partnership with the International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK (ISKO UK) , the Royal Society of Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group (RSC CICAG) and the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS […]
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