Peter Willett – reflections on the occasion of his retirement
Peter Willett retired from the Information School at The University of Sheffield at the end of 2019 after a long and hugely successful career. Peter is well known throughout the world for his contributions to information retrieval, bibliometrics and chemoinformatics. As well as being a hugely influential researcher, Peter is also held in very high […]
Diagnosing Enterprise Search
As a digital workplace consultant, I often find myself in workshops with employees to gather requirements. Invariably within a few minutes someone will say “we can never find stuff, the search is awful”, and the whole group will nod agreement. My company, ClearBox Consulting, has been working in the intranet and digital workplace space since […]
The Open University at 50: a research profile
(A note from the Editor. From 2006-2008 I worked with an outstanding team (Ian Roddis, Nicky Waters and Jed Cawthorne) on the development of a new intranet and the selection of a new search application. In the course of the user interviews I realized my view of The Open University as just a distance-learning provider […]
Syria’s First Web Search Engine: An Interview with Shadi Saleh
This interview was conducted by on Saturday, July 13, 2019 (editing for brevity and language jointly by the interviewer and interviewee.) Jochen Leidner: Today, I have on the line Shadi Saleh, co-founder of the first-ever Web search engine in Syria. I met Shadi at ECIR 2019 [the 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval] in Cologne, […]
My week: Natasha Chowdory, a CEBIS Specialist at a large hospital in the West Midlands
Our work is fairly constant, with large influxes in September and January from people gearing up for conference submissions. However, it’s not just conference submissions but also applying for research grants. A fair amount of the research we do, will contribute to bids that individuals make for the hospital – some of which that have […]
What’s wrong with Boolean strings?
In our previous posts we explored some of the challenges involved in formulating complex Boolean strings and expressions, and reviewed six of the more innovative alternative solutions. Each of these offers its own unique perspective on how to solve such problems, and their pioneering efforts provide us with a rich set of design insights and principles. In this brief […]
1959 – the dawn of relevance and the benefits of IR
There was a remarkable amount of interest in the publication of a belated obituary of Karen Sparck Jones in the New York Times on 9 January 2019. I was delighted to see that the University of Cambridge obituary for Karen (published at the time of her death in 2007) has now been updated with the […]
Visualizing search strategies (part 2)
In our last post we reviewed some of the issues involved in developing effective solutions to complex search problems, and explored some of the challenges involved in formulating and representing Boolean strings and expressions. In particular, we explored the contribution of three experimental systems which aimed to offer an alternative to the conventional approach exemplified by line-by-line query builders and ‘advanced […]
Visualizing search strategies
According to the IDC whitepaper, The High Cost of Not Finding Information, knowledge workers spend 2.5 hours per day searching for information. Whether they eventually find what they are looking for or just stop and make a sub-optimal decision, there is a high cost to both outcomes. The recruitment industry, for example, relies on Boolean search as the […]
Designing search: managing the information journey
In our last post, we looked at the role of metaphors and models in search, and explored one particular metaphor that was valuable for both its simplicity and utility: the chess metaphor. This simple notion helps us frame and structure the search experience in a way that allows us to better understand the stages involved, […]
Designing search: models and metaphors
It’s often said that search is a conversation: a dialog between two participants that can be every bit as rich as human conversation. On one side is the user, with an information need articulated in the form of a query, and on the other side is the system, with its response in the form of […]
BCS Search Industry Awards 2017
As you may recall, last year we launched the inaugural Search Industry Awards programme, which attracted nominations from across the globe and culminated in a memorable awards ceremony at Search Solutions 2016. My colleagues and I are delighted therefore to launch this year’s Search Industry Awards, celebrating the best search innovations of 2017. Presented by […]
IRSG Support for Events
The BCS IRSG can support events in four different ways: We can provide Sponsorship. We can provide financial support for suitable IR-related events. There are restrictions on how our money can be used due to the status of our parent body, the British Computer Society, as a British Registered Charity. For example, we can provide […]
Call for Book Reviews (Spring 2017)
This issue we include another Call for Reviews in which we seek reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to the IR community. Books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are interested […]
A Case for Satellite Events in Evaluation Campaigns
Local conferences, such as TREC in North America, CLEF in Europe, and NTCIR in Asia, play a leading role in promoting information retrieval research by supporting novel campaigns and releasing datasets to share the latest research challenges. To gain access to these datasets, participants are requested to communicate their work in the form of working […]
A framework for chatbot evaluation
Unless you’ve been on another planet for the last year or so, you‘ll almost certainly have noticed that chatbots (and conversational agents in general) became quite popular during the course of 2016. It seems that every day a new start up or bot framework was launched, no doubt fuelled at least in part by a […]
Information retrieval, information literacy: a common cause?
What do information retrieval (IR) and information literacy (IL) have in common? At a fundamental level, they are both concerned with enabling users to locate and retrieve information, and thereby to meet their information needs; and the deployment of IL is partly dependent on IR systems. To a large extent, there is therefore a common […]
Deep Learning In the News – Digest
It seems you can’t go very far these days without hearing something about Deep Learning. Here is a quick digest of some of the recent Deep Learning news and blog posts and a couple of pointers to potentially useful resources. This compilation was made possible thanks to Lumi News AI. Articles in this digest appeared […]
Searching for talent: the IR challenges of recruitment professionals (part 3)
And finally… here’s the third installment of my trilogy of posts on the information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals. The background to this (in case you missed the previous two) is that a few months ago I published a post describing our InnovateUK-funded research project investigating professional search strategies in the workplace. As you may […]
The IRSG Search Industry Awards
As you may know, for many years the IRSG has awarded prizes to its members in various forms, e.g. the Karen Sparck Jones award, best paper at ECIR, etc. These awards help create a sense of community and provide recognition to individual members for their work. However, the current awards programme is aimed almost exclusively […]
Conference Review: SIGIR 2016
The International ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR) returned to Pisa after 30 years for its 39th meeting. The conference was hosted in the Palazzo dei Congressi, a fantastic conference space just east of the centre of Pisa, alongside the river Arno. Organised by General Chairs Raffaele Perego and Fabrizio Sebastiani, […]
Third International Workshop on Gamification in Information Retrieval (GamifIR’16)
The 3rd Gamification in Information Retrieval (GamifIR 2016) Workshop, hosted at SIGIR 2016, started off with a highly insightful and timely keynote by Sebastian Deterding. Sebastian is a senior research fellow at the Digital Creativity Labs at the University of York, a founder and principal designer of the design agency coding conduct, a founder of […]
Searching for talent: The information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals (part 2)
A while ago I published a post describing our InnovateUK-funded research project investigating professional search strategies in the workplace. As you may recall, we surveyed a number of professions, and the one we analyzed first was (cue drum roll)… recruitment professionals. It’s a profession that information retrieval researchers haven’t traditionally given much thought to (myself […]
Searching for talent: The information retrieval challenges of recruitment professionals (part 1)
A few months ago I published a post describing our InnovateUK research project investigating professional search strategies in the workplace. I’m pleased to say that the project has now completed, and we are currently analyzing the results. As you may recall, we surveyed a number of professions, and the one we examined first is (cue […]
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