Are we late for the summer edition? We don’t think so, as the summer is still in full swing. It’s difficult even to recall what a non-summer day looks like. Rain? Snow? Never seen … Welcome back to Informer! Let’s be purely factual this time to get you straight to the content. Take-home message number one: we introduce a brand-new set of awards.
The IRSG Search Industry Awards will recognise achievements in the search industry. We noticed that while a number of academic awards have been established over the years there appears to be a lack of recognition in the practitioner community. We start with two awards for ‘best search project’ and ‘most promising start-up’ this year and see how it goes. We will also have an award for the best presentation at our annual Search Solutions event. That brings me to take-home message number two: If you have not already marked the date in your diary, then here we go … 30th of November is when we hold Search Solutions 2016 at the BCS in London. It’s not a one-day event this year, not a two-day event but a full three days, starting with tutorials, the main event and closing with a co-located workshop on Information Access System Evaluation in Practice. Full line-ups to be sent out shortly but we can promise it’s full of great names and ideas!
Colin Wilkie is a new face in Informer (but probably one that you have come across before as he seems to be omnipesent – ECIR, SIGIR, Glasgow, London, Vienna, Whisky Society – you name it he is already there). Very little arm-twisting was needed to volunteer him to write up a summary of SIGIR 2016. Thanks for that.
Gabriella provides another detailed and nicely written up workshop review – this time summarising the Third International Workshop on Gamification in Information Retrieval (GamifIR’16). What a keynote talk, I am glad I was present … and a what a write-up, amazing!
Now it’s time we get to the practical part. I suggest you get your pencil and paper out as Tony will share more of his wisdom in his popular series on how the practitioner community actually conducts searches, it’s still about recruitment professionals, and this time we learn more about their typical search tasks. Fascinating stuff (and yes, it might come up in the exams!)
We also have another book review. Benjamin Kille reviews Daniel Schall’s Social Network-based Recommender Systems by Springer, and here we go again: if you would like to review one of our Springer books, then do get in touch with our book editor Frank Hopfgartner.
Last but never least – Andy’s ever-so-comprehensive listing of IR-related events. Need I say more?
Enjoy the summer!