Brexit: Making good progress.
Welcome to a new issue of Informer! Has it really been 7 years since we relaunched Informer? Then this must in fact be Editorial number 29 … it feels like it was just twenty minutes ago that I wrote the first one. Time flies when you are getting old. So perhaps it’s time to step down and leave the stage for some fresh blood. And that’s exactly what I am doing now … Read more…
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 been really successful! I am constantly amazed by how little time people leave to get the research for their proposal done and the date of the proposal itself. We have become adept at guessing the difference between someone who sends us an email saying ‘ASAP’ and one saying ‘as soon as possible’.
The wonderful attendees of FIRE 2018
The 10th annual meeting of the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE 2018) took place in Gandhinagar, India. The conference took place at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT). Several participants dubbed the venue as a mini zoo because of the varied wildlife, especially monkeys, squirrels and peacocks on the campus. FIRE 2018 was one of the biggest FIRE till date with over 80 participants and 11 invited speakers. Besides the main conference FIRE-2018 hosted six evaluation tracks and two tutorials.
FIRE 2018 consisted for the following tracks:
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 post, we reflect on the shortcomings of the Boolean string itself, and ask ourselves how we might do better.
Search Solutions is an important event in the world of search & information retrieval that is held in London every November. Search Solutions is comprised of sessions, keynote talks, panels, tutorials and unconference sessions like Fishbowl from top-notch researchers and influencers in search and information retrieval. Search Solutions was held at the BCS just off Cocent Garden in London. About 20 speakers from around the world gave talks related to search and information retrieval and its challenges in various domains. I was selected as a diversity scholar to attend this event. Thanks to Dr. Udo for having me on the diversity scholar list.
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 NYT reference. It never fails to surprise me how few people have an appreciation of the history of information retrieval and search both in terms of its technical development but even more of the people whose insights transformed our views of how to use computers to manage language.
One Day Events
Conferences/Workshops
CHIIR 2018: ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Information. A conference with a very clear focus on user issues in search. 10-14 March 2019. Glasgow, Scotland. http://sigir.org/chiir2019/
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