Martin White
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 […]
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 […]
Understanding Search Engines – Dirk Lewandowski
It is remarkable that this book is unique in its coverage of the development of the technology, business and impact of web search. The web search engines play such an important role in our lives and our business activities that we take them for granted. It’s not just a lack of books but a lack […]
Karen Spärck Jones Award 2023 – Timeline for nominations
Professor Jochen Leidner has been the Chair of the KSJ Awards panel since 2019. As his term of office has now come to a conclusion Dr. Haiming Liu (University of Southampton) is taking on the role for the next three years. The Award now alternates between ECIR and the Annual Conference of the European […]
An interview with William Wang – KSJ Award Winner 2022
I asked William Wang, who at ECIR 2023 was presented with the Karen Spark Jones Award for 2022, if he could respond to a series of questions about his background and career. I am most grateful to William for the care he put into his replies. What were your aspirations at high school? I have […]
Search Solutions 2022 Conference report
Search Solutions is managed by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society and is the only broad-spectrum search event outside of the USA. The conference was held at the BCS London office on 23 November, preceded by a day of Tutorials. The conference was held at the BCS London office on 23 November, […]
And finally – from the Editor
I’ve included a conference report in this issue of Informer on the Alan Turing Institute conference on LLMs (held in London on 23 February) to give an indication of the speed of development of LLMs and related applications (ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and oh so many more!) over the last few months. The opportunities for research […]
In the Autumn issue
Let me start with IRSG business. Udo has written his last post as Chair as a new Chair will take over after the AGM on 23 November. There have been no candidates to take on the Editorship of Informer so next year we are planning to publish just two issues (in April and November) in […]
Informer in 2023
For most of its history Informer has been published four times a year. In 2023 the plan is to publish just two issues because efforts to find someone to take over the editorship have not been successful. I have agreed to continue to act as Editor but because of other commitments I can only commit […]
Search Solutions Conference 2022 – London, 23 November
Search Solutions 2022 will take place at the BCS London office at 25 Copthall Avenue London, EC2R 7BP, which is a 10 minute walk from either Liverpool Street or Moorgate Underground stations. Session 1: The Search Experience: Focus on the users 10:00 – 10:15 Introduction 10:15 – 10:45 Natasha den Dekker (LexisNexis) “How to conduct […]
Search Solutions Tutorials 2022 – London 22 November
The Search Solution Tutorials will take place at the BCS London office at 25 Copthall Avenue, London, EC2R 7BP. This is around a 10 minute walk from either Liverpool Street or Moorgate underground stations. Tutorial 1 – Full day IR From Bag-of-words to BERT and Beyond through Practical Experiments Sean MacAvaney (University of Glasgow) Craig […]
Perspectives on the EU Horizon DoSSIER Project
In this feature item there are three excellent contributions from members of the DoSSIER project. DoSSIER is an acronym for an EU Horizon 2020 ITN/ETN on Domain Specific Systems for Information Extraction and Retrieval There are three contributions from members of the project team A Summary of the First DoSSIER Training School, which took place […]
The evolution of Datafari, a European open source enterprise search application – Cedric Ulmer CEO
I have recently been asked for a customer to deliver an analysis of available open source solutions as a replacement to a decade old proprietary enterprise search solution. In this article, I wanted to share the outcome of this analysis, and to give an outlook of how we perceive the future of such solutions. As […]
Carlos Cuadra 1925-2022 A pioneer in commercial IR service development
Carlos Cuadra died in August this year. I doubt many readers of Informer will recognize the name but Carlos was a remarkable innovator in information retrieval in the 1960s and 1970s. Almost all his development work was carried out in a commercial environment, notably at System Development Corporation when it was spun out of RAND […]
The Book of Search – Book Review
Spoiler alert – this is a review of a book published in 2006! First a short history lesson. FAST Search and Transfer was founded in 1997 to commercialize search technology developed at the University of Trondheim. The subsequent history of FAST is difficult to untangle as the company seemed adept at delivering some very neat […]
A History of Enterprise Search 1938-2022
If you will exclude some self-promotion from the Editor, last month my book A History of Enterprise Search 1938-2022 was published under the PressBooks imprint of the University of Sheffield. If you have cause to doubt that there were any enterprise search initiatives in 1938 then you should certainly read this book. Enterprise search has […]
Books for search researchers and search managers
For some time now I have maintained a list of books on the Intranet Focus web site that I think would be of interest to search researchers and search managers. I am in the process of rebuilding the web site and so many of the internal links to reviews of the books will no longer […]
And finally….!
As I undertake my daily scanning of the research papers on information retrieval, I continue to be impressed with the level of innovation that I see. Clearly significant advances are being made into many areas. My concern is how these advances are going to feed into search products that are going to make a commensurate […]
In the Summer issue
NOTICE: The BCS IRSG is seeking new committee members. If you are interested to find out more please see details on the nomination and election process. November 3rd 2022 is the deadline for nominations. Can I start by highlighting the forthcoming vacancy for an Editor for Informer, to take over at the end of 2022. […]
Vacancy for an Informer Editor from January 2023
I took over the role as the Editor of Informer in 2019 and have enjoyed the challenge of publishing a quarterly newsletter that in each issue has something of interest to the very varied IRSG. Earlier this year I decided that it was time to hand over the Editorial Desktop as I wanted to gently […]
BCS/IRSG Search Industry Awards 2022
The BCS Search Industry Awards recognise people, projects, and organisations that have excelled in the design of search and information retrieval products and services. If you know of any people, projects, or products that deserve recognition, let us know by submitting a nomination. Alternatively, if you’re involved with something special yourself, you can submit an […]
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