Welcome to a new edition of Informer and a very short editorial (just to find out if anybody notices). What do we have to offer this time? First of all we have a number of workshop and conference reviews. March saw the annual iConference leaving America for the first time and what better place to organise it than Berlin?
We had our reporter there who sent us a detailed account of the Beyond single-shot text queries (MindTheGap’14) workshop, a workshop aimed at bringing together the IR, NLP and UX communities. Was it a success? Read on in Jon Chamberlain’s report …
This month the IRSG’s annual flagship event took place and ECIR 2014 was indeed a great success. Thanks to the organisers for making ECIR a memorable experience! We include two reviews, Kamran Abbasi gives his account of the main conference and Gabriella Kazai summarises the pre-conference workshop on Gamification for Information Retrieval. A final word about ECIR 2014. If you missed the conference, you find an excellent one-minute summary by Jenda Rybák on YouTube (your task if you fancy: spot the IRSG committee members!)
It’s not all reviews. We also have a piece on the EU-funded COST Network MUMIA written up by Mike Salampasis and John Tait. The network activities are soon coming to an end but there are still a few highlights to come this year, watch out! Speaking of highlights, among next year’s highlights will certainly be ECIR 2015 and PC co-chair Allan Hanbury gives us a sneak preview into the Austrian IR scene (more to follow!)
That leaves us with another call for book reviewers compiled by our books editor Cathal Gurrin and finally, as always the first piece to be ready for the new edition of Informer, the events diary compiled by Andy MacFarlane. We hope you enjoy this issue and do drop us an email if you want to contribute to a future edition of Informer of be in charge of an entire issue.
Good night!