Alan Turing Institute Conference on LLMs February 2023 – a historical perspective?

This symposium, organized by the Alan Turing Institute,  was held at the IET, Savoy Place on 23 February and attracted around 350 delegates, including what seemed to be the entire UK machine learning research community. There were seven presentations and a panel session that I was not able to stay for. (Note from the Editor. Two… Continue reading Alan Turing Institute Conference on LLMs February 2023 – a historical perspective?

ECIR 2023 Industry Day

The European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) seems to have emerged from the pandemic stronger than ever. This year, in Dublin, saw the highest number of attendees ever, I’m told, at over 380 in-person and virtual attendees. I’m not a computing academic, so I don’t sit through the academic presentations, but the last day of… Continue reading ECIR 2023 Industry Day

Search Solutions 2022 Conference report

Search Solutions is managed by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society and is the only broad-spectrum search event outside of the USA. The conference was held at the BCS London office on 23 November, preceded by a day of Tutorials. The conference was held at the BCS London office on 23 November,… Continue reading Search Solutions 2022 Conference report

SIGIR 2022 Annual Conference – a report from Dennis Aumiller

Another month, another conference back in person! The ACM SIGIR 2022 conference – the special interest group’s premier event – was back in person for the first time since 2019, and for the first time ever made its stop in beautiful and sunny Spain. Hosted by general chairs Enrique Amigó, Pablo Castells and Julio Gonzalo,… Continue reading SIGIR 2022 Annual Conference – a report from Dennis Aumiller

Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2020) – a report from Dennis Aumiller

With a delay of over two years, attendees of the bi-annual Language Resources and Evaluation Conference 2022 (LREC) finally arrived in sunny Marseille. After originally scheduled for May 2020, but then being canceled due to travel restrictions and nation-wide lockdowns, the organizers decided to revive the original conference location and agreed on the currently predominant… Continue reading Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2020) – a report from Dennis Aumiller

Reflections on ECIR 2022 by Krisztian Balog, Kjetil Nørvag and Vinay Setty

Krisztian Balog, Kjetil Nørvag and Vinay Setty have authored a detailed review of the very successful ECIR 2022 event held in Stavanger, Norway, in April. The review, which is published in the June 2022 issue of SIGIR Forum, runs to 12 pages. To quote from the Conclusion “One of the biggest organizational challenges was dealing… Continue reading Reflections on ECIR 2022 by Krisztian Balog, Kjetil Nørvag and Vinay Setty

Search Solutions 2021 – Tutorials report

As has been the custom, the main Search Solutions 2021 event has again been preceded by a day of tutorials. Two tutorials were successfully delivered on the day: an introduction to Natural Language Processing and a “Practitioners’ Evaluation Roundtable” (which was not a tutorial in the strict sense). Haiming Liu, Ingo Frommholz and Jochen Leidner… Continue reading Search Solutions 2021 – Tutorials report

BCS Search Industry Awards 2021

At the BCS IRSG Search Solutions 2021 Conference on 24 November there was a session during which the BCS Search Industry Awards for 2021 were presented by Tony Russell-Rose on behalf of the IRSG Committee. The Conference was once again (and hopefully for the last time!) virtual so there was no opportunity to applaud the winners. This year there… Continue reading BCS Search Industry Awards 2021