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 […]
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 […]
ECIR 2021 Industry Day highlights
The Spring issue of Informer contained a number of articles on the very successful ECIR 2021 event, so I decided to carry over some reflections on the Industry Day to this issue. My first visit to ECIR was the 2011 Dublin event where I presented my SearchCheck methodology, which in the event was eventually launched […]
The Information Retrieval Anthology 2021: inaugural status report and challenges ahead
To quote from a paper published in the June 2021 issue of SIGIR Forum, “The Information Retrieval Anthology, IR Anthology for short, is an endeavor to create a comprehensive collection of metadata and full texts of IR-related publications. We report on its first release, the use cases it can serve, as well as the challenges […]
Fairness and Bias in Information Retrieval Glasgow 23 March 2021
2020 was a notable year in information retrieval research and development. First there was the realization that AI applications were going to need a level of transparency that would reassure customers that they were supporting, not controlling, the search process. Second there was the realization that the search community had a responsibility to think beyond […]
ECIR 2021 Conference Supplement
ECIR 2021 was an outstanding event from every perspective. In this first-ever Supplement you will find An overview of the event Some notes on the keynote papers (including the Karen Spark Jones lecture) with links to the videos of the presentations A list of the Award Winners A report on an important panel session on […]
ECIR 2021 Conference overview
Raffaele Perego and Fabrizio Sebastiani are in the process of writing a full report on the conference for SIGIR Forum, and have kindly provided a short reflection for Informer that illustrates the scale, breadth and success of the event, with some notes on the technology platforms.
ECIR 2021 Keynote presentations
There were three keynote presentations at ECIR 2021, carefully scheduled for the end of the day for the benefit of participants in North and South America and early risers in the Asia-Pacific region. I’m not going to try to summarise the talks in any depth but hopefully I will encourage you to sit down with […]
Karen Spark Jones Award 2020 and Lecture
The British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the BCS created an award in 2008 to commemorate the achievements of Karen Spärck Jones. Karen was Professor Emerita of Computers and Information at the University of Cambridge and one of the most remarkable and influential women in computer science.
ECIR 2021 Awards
A list of the Award winners is given below
ECIR 2021 – Discussion Panel on Open Access
On 31 March 2021, the Wednesday morning of ECIR 2021, the conference participants joined with seven panellists in a discussion on Open Access and Information Retrieval (IR), or more accurately, on the lack of open access publishing in IR. Discussion topics included the experience of researchers with open access in Africa; business models for open […]
Another BIR Please — Report of the 11th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval
The 11th Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval Workshop (BIR 2021) was held online on April 1st, 2021, at ECIR 2021 as virtual event only for the 2nd time due to the pandemic situation. As before, the aim of the interdisciplinary BIR workshop series is to bring together researchers from different communities, especially scientometrics/bibliometrics and information retrieval. In […]
ECIR 2021 – Cooking Class with Chef Paolo Monti
What can a conference organiser offer to virtual participants as a social programme? The brilliant solution from the ECIR team was to offer two cookery classes from the most renowned chef in Lucca. You can watch the demonstrations and download the recipes from the web site.
Paul Cleverley’s presentation to Search Solutions 2020 has now been published
At Search Solutions 2020 Paul Cleverley presented a paper on the research he had carried out with Fionualla Cousins and Simon Burnett on the search patterns for Covid-19 within a very large oil and gas company during the initial stages of the lockdown in early 2020. Paul was not able to share his presentation slides […]
KMWorld Enterprise Search and Discovery 2020 – conference report
The KMWorld conference, managed by Information Today Inc. is probably the flagship event of the US library and information professional community and for the last few years has been held in Washington DC every November. It has always been a multiple track conference and has included an Enterprise Search and Discovery track. This dates back […]
Search Solutions 2020 – Conference report
That Search Solutions 2020 took place at all is a tribute to superb teamwork from Ingo Frommholz, Udo Kruschwitz, Haiming Liu, Tony Russell-Rose, Steven Zimmerman and myself aided by Slack. By the end of the development phase almost 100 Slack messages had arrived in my in-box! Search Solutions is a very important source of revenue […]
Search Solutions 2020 – Tutorial Report
On 24th November 2020, a day before the Search Solutions main event, a Search Solutions tutorial on Reinforcement Learning for Information Retrieval was given by Alexander Kuhnle, Miguel Aroca-Ouellette, John Reid and Dell Zhang from Blue Prism AI Labs. Reinforcement Learning (RL), as a third machine learning paradigm besides supervised and unsupervised learning, is gaining […]
Strix Lecture 2020 event – 26 November 2020
The 6th Tony Kent Strix Annual Memorial Lecture 2020, hosted by the UK electronic information Group (UKeiG), took place on Thursday, 26th November 2020, and was regarded as a great success by the organisers. It was delivered by the 2019 Strix award winner Professor Ingemar J. Cox, Department of Computer Science at University College London.
CLEF 2020 – some student perspectives
Editor – I’m delighted to be able to publish reports on the CLEF2020 conference from some of the students who attended the conference, which took place in September 2020. I gave them a set of four headings and a word length. I feel it is important to capture the views of students on events as […]
Microsoft Research New Future of Work Conference 3-5 August 2020 – Part 1 The conference technology platform
Microsoft Research was able to set up its New Future of Work conference (August 3-5) as a virtual conference right from the start. This meant that it was probably one of the first to be designed at the outset to be virtual rather than adopting and adapting an existing one-site conference agenda. The conference was […]
ECIR 2020 Keynote Joana Gonçalves de Sá
[Note from the Editor – this is the third of the three ECIR 2020 keynotes. Summaries of the keynotes given by Chirag Shah and Jamie Callum can be found in the Spring 2020 issue of Informer] Joana Gonçalves de Sá is an Associate Professor at Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa […]
ECIR 2020 – The role of knowledge in supporting IR applications
There was one very clear takeaway from ECIR 2020, a theme that to me kept occurring throughout many of the presentations at ECIR. This was the role of explicit knowledge in support applications, in particular the role of ontologies. There are many search technologies that can benefit from ontologies e.g. entity linking and recognition where […]
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