The annual Tony Kent Strix Annual Memorial Lecture was held on December 9th. The lecture was given by the 2020 Strix Award winner Ian Ruthven (Professor, University of Strahtclyde). He delivered his journey of research over the past 20 years where attendees learned that many of his contributions were through collaborative efforts with many researchers… Continue reading Strix Lecture 2021 – 9 December 2021
Category: Conference Review
ECIR 2021 Industry Day highlights
The Spring issue of Informer contained a number of articles on the very successful ECIR 2021 event, so I decided to carry over some reflections on the Industry Day to this issue. My first visit to ECIR was the 2011 Dublin event where I presented my SearchCheck methodology, which in the event was eventually launched… Continue reading ECIR 2021 Industry Day highlights
The Information Retrieval Anthology 2021: inaugural status report and challenges ahead
To quote from a paper published in the June 2021 issue of SIGIR Forum, “The Information Retrieval Anthology, IR Anthology for short, is an endeavor to create a comprehensive collection of metadata and full texts of IR-related publications. We report on its first release, the use cases it can serve, as well as the challenges… Continue reading The Information Retrieval Anthology 2021: inaugural status report and challenges ahead
Fairness and Bias in Information Retrieval Glasgow 23 March 2021
2020 was a notable year in information retrieval research and development. First there was the realization that AI applications were going to need a level of transparency that would reassure customers that they were supporting, not controlling, the search process. Second there was the realization that the search community had a responsibility to think beyond… Continue reading Fairness and Bias in Information Retrieval Glasgow 23 March 2021
ECIR 2021 Conference Supplement
ECIR 2021 was an outstanding event from every perspective. In this first-ever Supplement you will find An overview of the event Some notes on the keynote papers (including the Karen Spark Jones lecture) with links to the videos of the presentations A list of the Award Winners A report on an important panel session on… Continue reading ECIR 2021 Conference Supplement
ECIR 2021 Conference overview
Raffaele Perego and Fabrizio Sebastiani are in the process of writing a full report on the conference for SIGIR Forum, and have kindly provided a short reflection for Informer that illustrates the scale, breadth and success of the event, with some notes on the technology platforms.
ECIR 2021 Keynote presentations
There were three keynote presentations at ECIR 2021, carefully scheduled for the end of the day for the benefit of participants in North and South America and early risers in the Asia-Pacific region. I’m not going to try to summarise the talks in any depth but hopefully I will encourage you to sit down with… Continue reading ECIR 2021 Keynote presentations
Karen Spark Jones Award 2020 and Lecture
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. Karen was Professor Emerita of Computers and Information at the University of Cambridge and one of the most remarkable and influential women in computer science.
ECIR 2021 Awards
A list of the Award winners is given below
ECIR 2021 – Discussion Panel on Open Access
On 31 March 2021, the Wednesday morning of ECIR 2021, the conference participants joined with seven panellists in a discussion on Open Access and Information Retrieval (IR), or more accurately, on the lack of open access publishing in IR. Discussion topics included the experience of researchers with open access in Africa; business models for open… Continue reading ECIR 2021 – Discussion Panel on Open Access