Melting motorways and buckled rails? The summer has arrived in England. Welcome to a new edition of Informer. This is a Special Summer Edition in that we kept this issue (and the editorial) as short as possible so that we do not distract you too much from your summer reading.
First some updates on what the IRSG committee is currently working on. We will review the bids for ECIR 2015 over the summer and expect to announce the winning bid soon after. Remember, that ECIR 2014 will be held in Amsterdam. The current year will however see another few IRSG-organised events taking place. First of all, FDIA 2013, that primarily aims at postgraduate students to present and discuss their ideas, will take place in Granada as part of ESSIR 2013. Then we will see ICTIR 2013 in Copenhagen and finally we are preparing the programme for Search Solutions 2013. More details to be announced very shortly, only this much for now: expect some top names in IR among the mix of speakers!
In this issue we include a review of the 13th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR’13). This workshop series is now well established in the annual IR calendar and one interesting aspect about it is the structure of the talks: apart from full papers and demos there is a category called Compressed papers which is work that has recently been published or will be published soon in research outlets such as SIGIR, ECIR, OAIR and JASIST. A very interesting model that manages to draw in a fairly big community of researchers.
Tyler continues his series on Information Wayfinding. This is fascinating stuff as Tyler’s ambition is “nothing less than to subtly reframe the way we think about interacting with information on Web sites, in mobile applications, and in other digital experiences“. And he knows what he is talking about!
We also have a book review for you. Epaminondas Kapetanios discusses “Recommender Systems for Social Tagging Systems”, an edited volume by Marinho et al. that brings together research being conducted in two different communities, namely recommender systems and social tagging. As always, we include a list of recently published Springer books that are available for review. My top tip for today: if you are a PhD student about to submit your thesis and you want to polish your literature review, then why not check whether Cathal has a book in stock that you would like to read anyway to update your discussion of related work.
Our events editor Andy has again compiled a calendar of events and if you do want your IR event to be inlcuded in future, then do let us know.
Now for something completely different. Congratulations to the winners of the recent SIGIR elections! If you have not met the new committee, then SIGIR in Dublin next week will be your chance to catch up with them.
And finally, if you do attend SIGIR next week, then be prepared and follow the suggestion of health experts: “Drink cold drinks regularly, such as water and fruit juice. Avoid tea, coffee and alcohol.” The stress is on the second sentence.