Editorial
This issue has turned into a conference special issue as there were a welcome number of events in November that need to be recorded. In chronological order the month started with the Enterprise Search and Discovery Track at KMWorld, which would normally be held in Washington DC. A feature of the conference was the use […]
From Udo Kruschwitz – BCS/IRSG Chairman
In my role as new Chair of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group it gives me great pleasure to wish you — our dear readership — a Happy New Year! This actually sends me back in time recalling those days/nights when I wrote the editorials for Informer, the pressure of writing something sensible, recruiting a […]
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.
BIR2021 1 April 2021
The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop series (BIR) at ECIR goes into its 11th iteration. This workshop held online in conjunction with the 43rd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2021), and will tackle issues related to academic search, at the intersection between Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics. The organisers strive to get the ‘retrievalists’ and ‘citationists’ […]
ECIR 2022 and ECIR 2023 – locations confirmed
So that you can start to plan your travel arrangements in 2022 and 2023 ECIR 2022 will be held in Stavanger, Norway, under the direction of Kristian Balog. The web site is ECIR2022 but no content has yet been posted. The Twitter address is @ecir2022 The venue for ECIR 2023 will be Dublin.
Fairness and Bias in Information Retrieval 23 March 2021
A one-day online workshop on Fairness and Bias in Information Retrieval will take place on 23 March 2021.The workshop will bring together practitioners from academia and industry to discuss the challenges relating to fairness in information retrieval (IR) that are faced by industry, and the recent advances in fair IR research. The workshop should have […]
Events Winter 2021
Note: Due to the COVID-19 crisis some events have been cancelled, postponed or will be run virtually. We have provided information on each of the events with the current status at the time of writing. Please check the URL of the event for further details.
ECIR 2021 March 28 to April 1
ECIR 2021, the 43rd edition of the annual BCS-IRSG European Conference on Information Retrieval will be held in Lucca from March 28 to April 1, 2021. ECIR is the premier European forum for the presentation of new research results in the broadly conceived area of Information Retrieval (IR), and has a strong focus on the […]
B C, Before Computers: On Information Technology from Writing to the Age of Digital Data – Stephen Robertson
From an information technology perspective my career has seen some remarkable developments. I started out using 80-column cards at university in 1967 and then 10,000 hole optical coincidence cards at the start of my career in 1970. But did you know that the size of an 80-column card was the same size as US bank […]
Announcement of the Karen Sparck Jones Award for 2020
The winner of the 2020 Microsoft-BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award (to be presented at ECIR 2021 next year) is Dr. Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Principal Research Manager at Microsoft AI Research in Redmond, WA, USA. Dr Jochen Liedner is the IRSG representative on the Awards Committee if you have any recommendations for the 2021 Award. Note from the Editor – This BCS/IRSG Award is […]
Announcement of Strix Award for 2020
The UK electronic information Group (UKeiG) has announced that the winner of the 2020 Tony Kent Strix Memorial Award is Ian Ruthven, Professor of Information Seeking and Retrieval at the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde. Professor Ruthven leads the Strathclyde Information School Research Group (SISRG). SISRG operates across the boundaries between […]
And finally from the Editor….
The dramatic growth in scientific publishing during 2020 has lead to a number of discussions about open access publishing and open access to research services. A recent paper in Science provides a good introduction to the topic of open access if you are not entirely familiar with it. In my view there is a barrier […]
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