Welcome to a new edition of Informer! Ever wondered how to best get from London to Aberdeen? On a sleeper train! If you are confident enough that your paper gets accepted at ECIR 2017, then why not book early (to avoid disappointment) as it is now official that ECIR 2017 will be hosted by the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. What’s the nearest distillery? Sorry, I am digressing …
If you can’t wait until 2017, then we can suggest a range of events that might be of interest to you. First of all, there is our annual industry flagship event, Search Solutions 2015, with an amazing lineup and a novelty – no fishbowl session but a proper panel, and YOU could be the third panellist, joining Miles Osborne (Bloomberg) and Peter Wallqvist (RAVN). Just let us know why you would be a good choice and you might be in.
Looking even less far into the future, there is of course Susan Dumais’ Tony Kent Strix Award lecture on Friday, 6 November, entitled “Understanding and Improving Search using Large-Scale Behavioral Data” at the Geological Society in London. Incidentally, this year’s award winner was announced just last week at Enterprise Search Europe and the winner is Peter Ingwersen who will give his lecture next year. Congratulations to both of them!
Finally, if you want to catch that rare opportunity of meeting most of your Informer editors in a single place at the same time, then why not come along to the next Text Analytics London Meetup? But you need to be quick, places are limited.
Ok, time for a quick overview of the new issue. We start with a feature article by Roland Roller who presents some work on detecting adverse drug affects applying a currently very popular paradigm – semi-supervised learning, an approach that is particularly appealing when no annotated gold standard is available. His application area is natural language processing (NLP) but it is also an example that demonstrates how closely linked search and NLP technologies are these days.
We also have a feature article by our new co-editor, Gabriella, she is discussing how News Information Retrieval is becoming (again) the centre of attention in times where all these young people consume news in completely different ways which goes hand in hand with substantial changes in news generation and distribution.
Next up is Tony with yet more insights into how search professionals conduct their work and how the world around us is changing but the search patterns appear to remain as ever.
Julie Glanville introduces the Cochrane Information Retrieval Methods Group (IRMG) whose objectives have a lot in common with the IRSG. We shall hear more of them at Search Solutions.
Our new book editor Frank has compiled a list of Springer books any of which could be yours if you were willing to write a review in return.
Andy, effective as ever, has prepared the diary of IR events that you have been waiting. Here we go.
Cheerio!