The ECIR will take place in Vienna, Austria in 2015. Leading up to this event, we will have short presentations of some of the IR research groups in Austria in upcoming issues. To begin with, we provide a short overview of the IR landscape in Austria.
The Austrian IR community is small, but active, with IR work applied to a variety of modalities. Research in Austria is carried out both at universities, as well as at non-university research centres, where the work at the latter tends to be closer to the market. As is to be expected, music IR has an important place in the Austrian landscape, with research being done both at the University of Linz and at the Vienna University of Technology. Text retrieval work is done at six universities and the Know Center, a non-university research centre. It is often closely tied to activities on knowledge management and the semantic web, as well as to a specific focus on medical text analysis at the Medical Universities in Vienna and Graz. Image, video and multimedia search is tackled at two universities and the Austrian Institute of Technology, a further non-university research centre. Austria also has successful academic spin-off companies in the IR domain, including Spectralmind, max.recall, Lixto and m2n.
Within the Austrian informatics technology roadmap, IR is grouped into the Data Analytics and Big Data area, called “Conquering Data.” The roadmap document is downloadable from: http://conqueringdata.at. A strong emphasis in this document is placed on providing an environment encouraging data sharing and reproducible research in the computational sciences. Tying in with this strategy, the ECIR 2015 will introduce the “Reproducible IR Research” track, for which papers reproducing published results in IR are solicited.
We are looking forward to welcoming the IR community to Vienna in March 2015.