Editorial

Welcome to the Summer 2018 edition of Informer! We are back with a mix of news, reports and reminders, all from the world of search. Did I say reminder? If you are planning to host the top European Information Retrieval conference in 2020, then you have until Friday next week to hand in your bid.… Continue reading Editorial

Visualizing search strategies

According to the IDC whitepaper, The High Cost of Not Finding Information, knowledge workers spend 2.5 hours per day searching for information. Whether they eventually find what they are looking for or just stop and make a sub-optimal decision, there is a high cost to both outcomes. The recruitment industry, for example, relies on Boolean search as the… Continue reading Visualizing search strategies

CfP: Workshop on Ethics, Privacy, Transparency and Bias in Information Retrieval in Sheffield

More than ever before, information, algorithms and systems have the potential to influence and shape our experiences and views. Especially in the context of information retrieval and recommender systems, an awareness and understanding of areas, such as algorithmic accountability, transparency, governance and bias, are becoming increasingly important. Recent cases in the news and media have… Continue reading CfP: Workshop on Ethics, Privacy, Transparency and Bias in Information Retrieval in Sheffield

SIGIR 2018 Review

The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval took place at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor July 8th – 12th 2018. As usual, the conference was highly competitive, with a 21% acceptance rate for long papers! For the first time, China surpassed the USA with most accepted papers.… Continue reading SIGIR 2018 Review

Information Retrieval in the Workplace: a comparison of professional search practices

If you are interested in professional search and applications of IR in the workplace, you may be interested in a paper titled ‘Information Retrieval in the Workplace: a Comparison of Professional Search Practices‘ in Information Processing & Management. This work is a collaboration with Tony Russell-Rose and Leif Azzopardi, and uses a common research protocol to investigate and compare… Continue reading Information Retrieval in the Workplace: a comparison of professional search practices

Playing our way to understanding language: Workshop report for Games4NLP at LREC’18

Fresh back from Miyazaki, Japan and my mind is buzzing with new ideas about how language researchers can leverage the power of games to create and annotate language resources. The Games4NLP workshop aimed to promote and explore the possibilities for research and practical applications of using games and gamification for the creation of language resources… Continue reading Playing our way to understanding language: Workshop report for Games4NLP at LREC’18

Events Summer 2018

One Day Events Workshop on Ethics, Privacy, Transparency and Bias in Information Retrieval in Sheffield. A one day event focusing on some very hot topics given current events. https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2018/08/cfp-workshop-on-ethics-privacy-transparency-and-bias-in-information-retrieval-in-sheffield/ DIR2018: The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop 2018. 23 November 2018. Leiden, the Netherlands. http://dir2018.nl/ Our annual search solutions event will take place on Tuesday 27th November… Continue reading Events Summer 2018