Spring 2022

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 […]

The harbor of Stavanger at night (Source: The authors).

ECIR 2022 Experience Report

Dennis Aumiller and Satya Almasian, Heidelberg University After two years of (involuntary) abstinence from any in-person event, this year’s ECIR marked the start of a new era of hybrid conferences. Despite a late lifting of travel restrictions by the Norwegian government, which was announced only two months before the conference date, over 180 people decided […]

KSJ Award Ceremony (Photo credit Jochen Leidner).

Karen Spärck Jones (KSJ) Award Presentation at ECIR 2022

A report from Haiming Liu and Jochen Leidner. On Wednesday 14 April Professor Jochen L. Leidner gave the prestigious KSJ award for talented early career researchers in Information Retrieval (IR) or Natural Language Processing (NLP) to Dr Ivan Vulić at ECIR 2022.

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 […]

From the  BCS IRSG Chair

From the BCS IRSG Chair

Hello everybody and welcome back to a world of in-person meetings, conferences and banquets. Just as we had started to get used to living in a virtual world we will have to adapt again. Do you even remember what it was like to ask a question from the floor? Or how about shaking hands? What’s […]

CHIIR 2022 in (virtual)  Regensburg

CHIIR 2022 report by Selina Meyer

Selina Meyer is a PhD student and research assistant at the Chair of Information Science, University of Regensburg. Her research focuses on empathetic conversational agents for behaviour change. Currently, she receives a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. The seventh ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR) was supposed to happen […]

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 […]

Graduate Student Corner – Pedro Ruas, University of Lisbon

I am currently a PhD student in the PhD Programme in Informatics at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. My main research interests are biomedical text mining and natural language processing. I have published several journal and workshop articles that focus on improving the named entity linking task and other text mining […]

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 […]