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… Continue reading 2019 Tony Kent Strix Award Lecture
Author: John Tait
Call for Nominations: IRSG Committee
The British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group seeks nominations from members of the group to serve on the committee for a two year term from November 2017. The committee oversees the work of the officers of the group and takes decisions on a number of important matters including the location of ECIR, allocating funds… Continue reading Call for Nominations: IRSG Committee
IRSG Support for Events
The BCS IRSG can support events in four different ways: We can provide Sponsorship. We can provide financial support for suitable IR-related events. There are restrictions on how our money can be used due to the status of our parent body, the British Computer Society, as a British Registered Charity. For example, we can provide… Continue reading IRSG Support for Events
ECIR 2015 Industry Day
The ECIR Industry Day in 2015 in Vienna followed a new format. Past ECIR Industry Days have generally followed the format of a number of talks, mainly from search majors, in parallel with the final day of the main conference. This year the Industry Day was run after the main conference with the focus being… Continue reading ECIR 2015 Industry Day
2014 Karen Spӓrck Jones Lecture – Wendy Hall
Professor Dame Wendy Hall of the University of Southampton was the 2014 IBM BCS Karen Spӓrck Jones Lecturer. The lecture celebrates the role of women in computing research, and Wendy took the opportunity to present a wide ranging lecture, using her own career as a framework within which to locate the many developments and changes … Continue reading 2014 Karen Spӓrck Jones Lecture – Wendy Hall
Celebrating Stephen Robertson’s Retirement
Stephen Robertson retired from the Microsoft Research Lab. in Cambridge during the summer of 2013 after a long career as one of the most influential, well liked and eminent researchers in Information Retrieval throughout the world. Stephen began his research career in the late 1960’s when he took an M.Sc. in Information Science at City… Continue reading Celebrating Stephen Robertson’s Retirement
Search: Emergent and Extrinsic Semantics
Semantics is a term often used in the search technology and information retrieval community these days. A distinction is drawn between semantic and traditional search, implying that somehow semantic search is a more advanced or sophisticated form. My claim in this article is that there are actually two forms of semantic search: emergent and extrinsic.… Continue reading Search: Emergent and Extrinsic Semantics