Editorial
In the Conference Year there are only two seasons. The first runs from March to early May and the second from October to early December. This particular bi-seasonal structure is primarily driven by the time it takes to promote the event and attract reservations. So in this issue I can offer you very good reports […]

Microsoft Search – status and roadmap
Office 365 is now almost ubiquitous in the corporate sector and increasingly in the public sector. Embedded into O365 is a search application which is optimized for Microsoft files and may well be the first time employees and IT departments have experienced a powerful search application. De facto it represents a benchmark against with other […]
BM25 – the magic dust of search?
A preprint of an ECIR2020 paper by Chris Kamphuis, Arjen de Vries, Leonid Boytsov and Jimmy Lin caught my eye recently as it reports on an investigation of eight variants of the BM25 scoring function. BM25 is where information retrieval meets search, as most search vendors will claim they are using BM25 but will never […]
Fair Information Retrieval for Industry Workshop 27 March Glasgow
Fair Information Retrieval for Industry is a one-day workshop, sponsored by IRSG and SICSA, that will bring together practitioners from academia and industry to discuss the challenges relating to fair IR that are faced by industry and recent advances in fair IR research.
ECIR 2020 Lisbon 14-17 April
The list of accepted papers at ECIR 2020 now been published. If like me, you are interested in the Industry Day
Events: Winter
One Day Events Fair Information Retrieval for Industry Workshop. 27th March, University of Glasgow, Glasgow. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fair-information-retrieval-for-industry-tickets-91620779217 LREC 2020: Workshop on Cross-Language Search and Summarization over Text and Speech. A one day workshop on cross language search with both text and speech. Marseilles, France. 16 May 2020. http://users.umiacs.umd.edu/~oard/clssts/ Conferences/Workshops ACM HotMobile 2020: The 21st Annual […]
2019 Tony Kent Strix Award Lecture
John Tait FBCS, Secretary of the IRSG, attended the Tony Kent Strix Award Lecture on Friday 29 November 2019 at the Royal Geographical Society in London. This is his report of the meeting If you don’t know it, the Tony Kent Strix Award is probably the second most prestigious life time achievement award in IR […]
Search Solutions 2019 – conference report
It is not easy to sit through a day of presentations on a wide range of topics and at the same time make good enough notes to prepare this detailed account of the meeting. I am grateful to Alberto Purpura for writing this excellent account. Search Solutions is the premier UK forum for presentation of […]
Taxonomy Bootcamp London 2019 – conference report
Helen Lippell is a highly experienced UK-based taxonomist and took on the role of Programme Chair for the inaugural event in 2016. There has been a Taxonomy Bootcamp event in the USA for some years but launching the event in the UK (especially with the ‘bootcamp’ label) was a significant commitment for Information Today Inc. […]
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