Martin White
The Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award 2022 – Call for Nominations deadline is 9 September
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 […]
JASIST special issue on information retrieval research
I was personally delighted to see the announcement from ASIS&T about a Special Issue in September 2023 on the topic of research into information retrieval. To quote from the announcement “We are looking for contributions that broaden the respective disciplinary, methodological, or empirical perspectives to identify and explore commercial search engines and their use and […]
Relevance management – tips, tricks, techniques and tools
When OpenSource Connections started the Haystack conference in 2018, our intention was to bring the search and relevance community together to share tips, tricks, techniques and tools. Although the talks that year weren’t recorded we swiftly realised that we could share them much more widely on video and we made sure to record all the […]
Taxonomies – Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information – Book review
There is probably no more difficult task in information management in being the Editor of a multi-author on any topic, and the level of difficulty goes up by an order of magnitude when the topic is taxonomy management. Taxonomies (and the strap line Practical Approaches to Developing and Managing Vocabularies for Digital Information) has been […]
The Limits of Batch Assessment of Retrieval Systems – Justin Zobell
I had the very good fortune to get to know Cyril Cleverdon towards the end of his distinguished career as Librarian at the Cranfield Institute of Technology and his invaluable work in creating and promoting the Cranfield Projects on information retrieval performance. These Projects formed the basis for the TREC events in the USA. At […]
The Science of Reading – Book review
You may be somewhat surprised to see a review of a book on the science of reading in Informer. It seems to be implicit in information retrieval research that ‘users’ have such a competence in reading that a consideration of reading ability can be discounted from the research analysis. If only that was the case! […]
Call for nominations for the UKeiG Tony Kent Strix Award 2022 – Deadline 9 September
The Tony Kent Strix Award was inaugurated in 1998 by the Institute of Information Scientists. It is now presented by UKeiG in partnership with the International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK (ISKO UK), the Royal Society of Chemistry Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group (RSC CICAG) and the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group […]
Making knowledge management clickable – Book review
There are many books about knowledge management but very few about what I might refer to as IKM (Information and Knowledge Management) technologies. What is distinctive about this book is that it spans the crevasse between KM and IT and does so with considerable flair. The authors, Zach Wahl and Joseph Hilger established Enterprise Knowledge (based in Arlington VA) close […]
SIGIR 2022 Annual Conference – a report from Dennis Aumiller
Another month, another conference back in person! The ACM SIGIR 2022 conference – the special interest group’s premier event – was back in person for the first time since 2019, and for the first time ever made its stop in beautiful and sunny Spain. Hosted by general chairs Enrique Amigó, Pablo Castells and Julio Gonzalo, […]
Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2020) – a report from Dennis Aumiller
With a delay of over two years, attendees of the bi-annual Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 2022 (LREC) finally arrived in sunny Marseille. After originally scheduled for May 2020, but then being canceled due to travel restrictions and nation-wide lockdowns, the organizers decided to revive the original conference location and agreed on the currently predominant […]
Reflections on ECIR 2022 by Krisztian Balog, Kjetil Nørvag and Vinay Setty
Krisztian Balog, Kjetil Nørvag and Vinay Setty have authored a detailed review of the very successful ECIR 2022 event held in Stavanger, Norway, in April. The review, which is published in the June 2022 issue of SIGIR Forum, runs to 12 pages. To quote from the Conclusion “One of the biggest organizational challenges was dealing […]
ACM Transactions on Information Systems – call for papers on neural information retrieval
The ACM TOIS journal is planning a special issue in 2023 on efficiency on neural information retrieval. The deadline for submissions is 31 December 2022 To quote from the ACM announcement
Funnelback and Me: Celebrating 30 Years of Funnelback Technology 1991-2021 – Book review
I expect that most readers of Informer will have read the 2011 edition of Modern Information Retrieval edited by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Riberio-Neto. It runs to almost 900 pages. Chapter 15 is a brilliant essay by David Hawking which sums up everything you should know about enterprise search in 40 pages. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research […]
Search Solutions 2022 London 23/24 November
Search Solutions 2022 returns to being on on-site conference this year at the BCS HQ in London (25 Copthall Avenue London, EC2R 7BP) though there could be some remote contributions from speakers facing challenges of predictable flight schedules and sensible fares. The Conference will be held on Thursday 24 November, with a day of Tutorials […]
And finally….from the Editor
The quarterly Informer newsletter has been published by IRSG for almost 30 years, initially as a PDF and since 2012 as a web journal using a WordPress platform. Throughout its history it has been a channel of record for conferences and other events and a means of alerting members to forthcoming events, constantly trying to […]
In the Spring issue
Pride of place in this overview of the Spring issue has to be the report on ECIR 2022, which so elegantly and effectively integrated the on-site and virtual conference experiences that I for one felt that I had been transported StarTrek-style from Horsham to Stavanger. Dennis and Satya have contributed a such a comprehensive and […]
ECIR 2023 Dublin – deadline dates for submissions
ECIR2023 will take place in Dublin on 2-6 April 2023. The web site is now live, and lists the organisers and programme chairs So that you can populate your Outlook or Google calendars the key dates for submissions are set out below. 9 September 2022 Workshop/Tutorial submission deadline 7 October 2022 Full papers submission deadline […]
ISKO UK/BCS IRSG Exploring Information Retrieval lectures series – February/March 2022
There has always been close cooperation between the IRSG and the UK Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organisations (ISKO UK), including a common interest in findability issues, including support our Search Solutions conference. Over the course of the pandemic ISKO UK made a significant contribution to maintaining its programme of meetings and workshop […]
SIGIR Forum December 2021 issue
The ACM SIGIR Forum is published twice a year, and is an essential read. The December 2021 issue came out after the Winter issue of Informer was published so this is my first opportunity to bring it to your attention. Each issue contains a few research papers and some abstracts of dissertations but the most […]
Graduate Student Corner – a new feature for Informer
The Graduate Student Corner concept was suggested to me last year by Professor Jochen Liedner with the following scope note “IRSG would like to offer doctoral students a forum to present their research in progress beyond the more formal workshop, conference and journal papers. Many of you have plenty of good ideas, and often the […]
NeurodiverseIT Specialist Group
The Information Retrieval Specialist Group can trace its origins back to 1998, though the British Computer Society itself was founded in 1957. There are over 50 Specialist Groups, and in 2022 a NeurodiverseIT Specialist Group was formed as the result of the independent efforts of Richard Cornell and Matthew Bellringer. The Group is run for […]
Enterprise Search Management training course from Intranet Focus Ltd
In 2012 I undertook a project for the European Commission which had as its objectives the identification of barriers to the development and use of enterprise search applications in the EU. The primary conclusion was that the lack of training for enterprise search software developers and for enterprise search managers was the major barrier.
Information – A Historical Companion (Review)
How do you review a book that runs to almost 900 pages? Answers on a pack of postcards please! Two books sparked my interest in the history of information. The first was A History of Online Information Services 1963-1976 by Bourne and Hahn which provides a vast amount of detail on the early development of […]
And finally…..from the Editor
When I started work at Logica in 1989 one of the most talented of my consulting team (let me call him John) had a significant visual handicap resulting from macular degeneration. At the time John had to rely on a horizontally-scrolling LED display of text to write reports and create emails. Apart from being a […]
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