By Udo Kruschwitz on 7th February 2018
Happy New Year!
Welcome to the Winter 2018 edition of Informer! Slightly later than usual, therefore we jump straight into the news section: Jochen Leidner (Director of Research at Thomson Reuters) and Frank Hopfgartner (Senior Lecturer at Sheffield University) are our new faces in the IRSG committee. Let’s give them a round of applause for their election success. We also welcome Steven Zimmerman (PhD student at Essex University) who has been co-opted as the student representative to the committee.
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By Tony Russell-Rose on 7th February 2018
![By dbking (Chess Players in Dupont Circle) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://isquared.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/800px-chess_players_in_dupont_circle_20109566.jpg?w=500)
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 a set of search results. Like human conversation, the outcome relies on a shared understanding of intent and context. Together, these elements form a crucial part of the search experience, guiding and shaping the dialog in productive directions.
But the conversational metaphor can only take us so far. There are levels of nuance to the linguistic interaction between human beings that go beyond simple bidirectional exchanges, and likewise, there are patterns and sequences of human information seeking behavior that transcend the conversational metaphor. At this level, we need to take a more holistic approach, and view search from the perspective of stages in an information journey. In this post, we consider one such model of the information journey that is valuable for both its simplicity and utility.
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By Steven Zimmerman on 7th February 2018
Fake News – a key theme of the day
Fake news, misinformation and toxic content were certainly the central theme to this years annual one day Search Solutions conference at the BCS headquarters in London. There were many other great presentations of the day to discuss as, but did not have the essence of relevance of the central theme of the day.
MISINFORMATION
The misinformation topic was introduced in the session just before lunch. Perhaps it was the hunger of speakers and audience that made the session undisputedly the most exciting. The conflicting views of one presenter and an employee of a company providing a popular search engine was just one of many highlights.
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By Frank Hopfgartner on 6th February 2018
Keeping up with the tradition of book reviews, we again seek reviewers for a number of recently published books in the fields of information and data science. As always, 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 in reviewing one of these books, please let me know which book you are interested in reviewing and we will arrange for a copy (paper or online format) to be sent to you along with review guidelines. The currently available books (courtesy of Springer Verlag) are:
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By Andy Macfarlane on 25th January 2018
One Day Events
Watch out for our annual Search Solutions event in November!
Conferences/Workshops
IUI 2018: 23rd International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. Of interest to members working on interfaces for search. 7-11 March 2018, Tokyo, Japan. http://iui.acm.org/
CHIIR 2018: ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval. Of interest to members working in the area of user interaction with search. 11-15 March 2018, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. http://sigir.org/chiir2018/
TEI 2018: Twelfth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interactions. Of interest to members working in the area of pervasive IR. 18–21 March, Stockholm, Sweden. https://tei.acm.org/2018/
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![By dbking (Chess Players in Dupont Circle) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://isquared.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/1280px-chess_board_opening_staunton.jpg)
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