Welcome to the summer 2012 edition of Informer. Summer? Wasn’t that the time of the year with no rain and plenty of sunshine and cocktails on white beaches? It seems the summer has passed without even saying hello.
But wait, most of this summer’s IR action is still to come when SIGIR 2012 kicks off in Portland next month. A glance at the list of accepted papers promises a very interesting programme. 98 full papers have been accepted (out of a total of 483 submissions), and as usual there is a strong industry focus (just to illustrate: 47 matches of the term Microsoft and 35 matches for Yahoo when searching the list of (full) papers). So if you have not registered but do plan to come, there is still time to do so. If you live locally and only manage to come to Portland for a day, then why not consider registering for SIGIR Industry Track only which will be held on Wednesday, 15 August.
Let us turn to BCS IRSG activities. We have again been busy over recent months in organising events and planning for the future. First of all, we assessed the bids to host ICTIR 2013 and we can report that the conference will be held in Copenhagen and we are looking forward to working closely over the coming year and a half with the three chairs Birger Larsen, Christina Lioma and Peter Ingwersen. A call to host ECIR 2014 has also been issued with a deadline in late August. Furthermore, IRSG joined forces with ISKO (the International Society for Knowledge Organization) to organise the seminar and workshop “I think, therefore I classify” which brought together a great number of people with diverse interests in classification in the widest sense. Finally, we have already started planning for Search Solutions 2012 (date for your diary: 29 November, with tutorials on the day before). If you have any suggestions for speakers, panels, contents in general, please let us know as this is the time to take these suggestions on board. You find a review of last year’s event in the Winter 2012 issue of Informer.
What do we have to offer today? This edition of Informer continues with Tony’s part 3 of Designing Faceted Search. And we also have another look at mobile applications following Tyler’s articles in our recent editions of Informer. This time he will focus on design principles for mobile search. Also, there are more books available for review, check Cathal’s call for book reviews. As usual we also have a calendar of event related to Information Retrieval. We hope you enjoy this edition of Informer. As always, please do get in touch if you are interested in contributing to future editions of our newsletter (or if you have a suggestion for doing an entire newsletter as a guest editor according to a particular theme). If you have events that you want to be listed in our calendar, then again, simply let us know.
Have a great summer!