Welcome to the Autumn 2018 edition of Informer! What a great time of the year, the days get shorter, the nights get colder, the Pound drops further. Happy days. You can be happy too if you do not miss our early-bird deadline to register for our annual practitioners’ event – Search Solutions! We have been running this event for more than 10 years now. Time flies like an arrow.
One thing you might be expecting at Search Solutions is the IRSG AGM. Well, in our pursuit to get more members to attend the AGM and therefore giving the committee more weight we looked around and adopted a model that has been used at SIGIR for many years – a lunch time SIGIR Business Meeting embedded in a key event that draws in the target audience. In our case we co-organised the AGM alongside a one-day workshop on ethics, privacy, transparency and bias in information retrieval in Sheffield. The workshop was excellent and the AGM was well attended. The new model has certainly worked and we expect to run the AGM in a similar fashion next year. At this point I should also add a welcome to Yashar Moshfeghi as a duly elected new member of the IRSG committee.
What else do we have on offer? Tony tells us more about Boolean search support using visualization. Yet more potential solutions and yet again the insight that these ideas haven’t solved the problems practitioners face in a professional search context. Will it ever be resolved? I am sure we will have more of Tony’s blog posts in future editions helping us to find the holy grail (of interactive search support with Boolean queries).
Who’s up next? Tony again? Well, bring him on! What a busy man. This time he tells us about the Search Industry Awards that are now in their third year. There are several categories all to be judged by a panel of industry experts, one of the new award categories this year is for the Search professional of the year. And there is still time to submit nominations! Deadline is 1 November (midnight Hawaiian time I assume).
We also have a conference report for you. Amelia W. Cole and Linda Achilles review this year’s Autumn School for Information Retrieval and Information Foraging which again took place at Schloss Dagstuhl. The Autumn School seems to be one of those hidden gems that allows younger researchers and those new to the field of interactive IR to learn from the experts in a friendly and informal setting (featuring an impressive wine celler and having nowhere to escape might help too).
Finally, thanks to our events editor Andy for compiling a comprehensive set of search-related events that are coming up in the next few months. Watch out for deadlines fast approaching.
Good night and hope to see you at Search Solutions (for our friends from ‘Europe’ perhaps the last time without a visa?)