And finally….

The seminal paper on the double-helix structure for DNA by Crick and Watson ends up with the statement “It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material”. A masterpiece of understatement. At the end of a research paper there is always… Continue reading And finally….

Summer 2019 Editorial

The centrepiece of this issue is a profile of the IR research and teaching activities of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Glasgow. This is the first of what I plan to be a series of profiles of university departments with a strong IR/search focus. Initially these will be UK departments but… Continue reading Summer 2019 Editorial

IRSG Forthcoming events

18 September TALMIRI – Talent meets IR Industry, Bedford TALMIRI is a new initiative for IRSG to complement the annual Search Solutions conference. It will be one-day symposium with the purpose of bringing together young and senior researchers and practitioners from industry on topics related to search and information retrieval. The objective is to awareness… Continue reading IRSG Forthcoming events

Awards

Awards open for nominations Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award – nominations close on 12 September The British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the BCS created an award in 2008 to commemorate the achievements of Karen Spärck Jones. The Award is sponsored by Microsoft Research. For more information… Continue reading Awards

Conference reports

ISKO 2019 Meeting The Human Position in an Artificial World: creativity, ethics and AI in knowledge organization ISKO UK’s sixth biennial conference was held at City, University of London on 15-16th July 2019 and was attended by 75 participants from 14 countries. David Haynes, Chairman of ISKOUK has kindly provided this summary of the meeting… Continue reading Conference reports

And finally…

I was delighted to note that Donna Harman has contributed a paper entitled Information Retrieval: the early years to the Now Publishing Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/Details/INR-065. It is easy to focus on the future and not appreciate the long history of the development of information retrieval. Many of the core elements of… Continue reading And finally…

Editorial

It is an honour to have been appointed as Editor of Informer in succession to Udo Kruschwitz. The first time I saw a real-time computer-based search service was at 10am on 23 February 1976. If you are wondering how I can be that precise over forty years later the secret is that at the time… Continue reading Editorial