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
Category: Feature Article
Towards Search Standardisation
The EU-funded COST Network IC1002 (http://www.mumia-network.eu/ ) is a four year (2010-2014) networking programme which aims to promote collaboration between researchers and professionals working on Multilingual and Multifaceted Information Access (MUMIA), principally in Information Retrieval, Machine Translation and related topics. More than 250 scientists and professionals from 28 COST countries and 4 non COST countries… Continue reading Towards Search Standardisation
New year, new direction?
The start of a new year is always a good time to reflect on the role and impact of groups such as ours, and ask the question ‘ why are we here?’ For many of us on the IRSG committee, the answer is simple: to promote the dissemination of IR knowledge and best practice in… Continue reading New year, new direction?
Information Wayfinding, Part 3: Designing for Wayfinding
How can we make ever-growing volumes of information accessible and useful to people without overwhelming them? That is the question I want to consider in this third and final instalment on information wayfinding. In Part 1, I argued that we must move beyond thinking of information interaction as a book of pages, and instead think… Continue reading Information Wayfinding, Part 3: Designing for Wayfinding
A roundup of Stefan Rueger's Multimedia IR Tutorials
The tutorial on Multimedia Information Retrieval at Search Solutions 2013 held at BCS’s headquarters in London was the last in a series of tutorials by Professor Stefan Rueger from the The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute. He started the series at the end of 2009 based on the first stages of his text book with… Continue reading A roundup of Stefan Rueger's Multimedia IR Tutorials
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
Tabs, facets and views: getting the interaction right
As the dominant interaction paradigm used throughout the world of eCommerce, faceted search provides a framework that supports the exploration and selection among thousands – if not millions – of diverse items. But sometimes faceted search needs to be combined with other types of UI control to provide alternative ways to view and organise content.… Continue reading Tabs, facets and views: getting the interaction right
Information Wayfinding, Pt 2: Elements of the Information Environment
In Part 1 of this series, I argued that vestiges of the pre-Web, print era still haunt digital experiences. To create information environments that are truly coherent, we must view them not as books full of pages, but as spaces to navigate and explore—much like finding our way through a city or a museum. This is… Continue reading Information Wayfinding, Pt 2: Elements of the Information Environment
Book Review : Recommender Systems for Social Tagging Systems: A review
Recommender Systems for Social Tagging Systems: A review by Epaminondas Kapetanios ISBN 978-1-4614-1894-8 The book, authored by Leandro Balby Marinho, Andreas Hotho, Robert Jäschke, Alexandros Nanopoulos, Steffen Rendle, Lars Schmidt, Thieme Gerd Stumme, Panagiotis Symeonidis, and published by Springer in 2012, discusses the role of recommender systems in order to serve social tagging systems. With… Continue reading Book Review : Recommender Systems for Social Tagging Systems: A review
Information Wayfinding, Part 1: A Not-So-New Metaphor
Browsing the Web. Surfing the Net. Navigating a Web site. Traversing a hierarchy. Going back. Scrolling up and down. Returning home. We’ve seen such metaphors throughout our history of using computers to interact with information. Haphazard though they may seem be, these metaphors highlight a universal reality of human psychology: we perceive the world—both physical… Continue reading Information Wayfinding, Part 1: A Not-So-New Metaphor