Martin White
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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