Welcome to our Spring 2018 edition of Informer! Knowing the busy lifestyle of our readership, we made this a compact issue that should quickly get you updated on some of the things going on in the world of search. First things first, ECIR is ranked A in the CORE conference rankings! This is largely due to the effort put in by IRSG committee member Craig Macdonald. Thanks for that! Furthermore, we have forged a closer link with the Information Retrieval journal. Exciting times!
What about the content of this edition of Informer? Our prominent feature article supplier Tony Russell-Rose is in action again. Tony shares more of his experience on how to design interactions with search engines that are not simply put together to do the job (as often enough observed) but that are designed with the user in mind. It sounds simple but if you do not have the user experience mind set and apply UX principles appropriately, then you quickly find lots of frustrated users — a situation that could often have easily been avoided.
We also have a comprehensive conference review of ECIR 2018 written by Parth Mehta. As you are aware, ECIR is our flagship academic event every year, while Search Solutions is more aimed at the practitioner community. Speaking of which, we are already preparing for Search Solutions 2018 with the first speakers lined up, but as always, do let us know if you are interested in giving a talk yourself. Most slides of previous events are available online and they give you an idea of what level of technical content you might pitch your talk at.
Isn’t time flying? ECIR is already over and the deadline for paper submission to ECIR 2019 fast approaching …
We furthermore have a jointly written piece by Steven Zimmerman and Samuel Dodson who report on their experience of attending the Autumn School for Information Retrieval and Information Foraging.
This time we also have a short article by Trung Huynh, PhD student at the Open University and Software Engineer at Google, who introduces his PhD research to us, essentially trying to make most of the power of neural networks to learn word representations. Very interesting work indeed. A side note to our readers: if you want your own research agenda featured, why not drop us an email? We are open to suggestions.
We conclude as usual with a comprehensively compiled list of search-related events that Andy provided as reliably as ever.
Well, that’s it for now. A quick outlook for what is to come. We are expecting a few book reviews and project updates to come in. We are also looking forward to some reports by PhD students on their exciting directions of research travel. Watch this space!
And don’t forget to enjoy the sun!