Welcome to the Autumn 2016 edition of Informer! It’s been a busy few months and as you can see we waited until the election period was over before going live so that we can now officially confirm (hot off the press) that Stefan Rüger is the new chair of the IRSG. Stefan brings in many years of experience on the committee and I would say let’s give him a round of applause!
So far so good, but what about the other roles? Hold tight, I will let you know! John Tait is taking over as Secretary, Michael Oakes remains Membership Secretary and so does Ingo Frommholz as Treasurer.
Now let’s have a look at what we have on offer in this issue. We start with a review by Helen Clegg who attended the Taxonomy Boot Camp in London the other week (which seems to have replaced the Enterprise Search Europe meeting). If this sounds interesting to you, then why not plan to attend next year as Helen tells us that the organisers have booked the venue for a follow-up event already.
Next up is our ever-reliable provider of state-of-the-art machine learning content, our very own co-editor Gabriella. This time she picks some recent articles around Deep Learning. In fact, it’s not just latest news but she also provides a few links that give a gentle introduction into the field. What’s even better, Gabriella does not have to do anything to compile this other than doing her everyday work …
In the final part of his trilogy that looks at the search behaviour of recruitment professionals Tony continues to dissect the way particular professions search and he illustrates how this is very different to everyday Web search. The simple conclusion one can draw from this analysis is that Boolean search is (still) not dead.
You thought that’s all? Well, no! We also have a review of the Autumn School for Information Retrieval and Foraging which again was held at Dagstuhl this year. Our guest author Mateusz Dubiel attended the autumn school and it sounds as if he enjoyed it a lot.
Finally, here we go, the contribution that always (and when I say always I mean always) gets written up first, about a minute after we realise that another three months have passed and that the next edition of Informer is due. It is the list of upcoming events compiled by Andy. Thanks, Andy!
Enjoy the wet weather!
P.S.: If you have not registered yet for Search Solutions 2016, then you better be quick as space is limited. Hope to see you there.