Welcome to our Spring 2023 edition of Informer! Have we seen you in Dublin? Not inconceivable given it was the biggest ECIR ever in many respects including number of attendees (more than 400 registrations!). It felt as if everbody was there … Well, in case you missed the conference there is plenty of reading material in this newsletter including a conference report by Gregor Donabauer as well as a review of Industry Day by Michael Upshall, not to forget the interview with William Wang, the winner of the Karen Spärck Jones Award 2022 and a keynote speaker at this year’s ECIR.
In fact, Martin has done all his magic once again to compile a new edition of Informer that feels bigger and more varied than ever. I let you explore it rather than pointing out each contribution I particularly like (of which there are many).
Let me just highlight one item of interest to our group in particular. The CORE conference rankings are currently being updated and it is very reassuring that the compilation of material to support the case for ECIR to remain an A-ranked conference is in the safe hands of Sean MacAvaney, Lecturer at the University of Glasgow and newly elected IRSG committee member. This task is not an easy one and involves much manual work such as the collection of statistics ranging from citation counts to identifying key members of the IR community and comparison with competitor conferences.
The last month has however also been a very sad one as the wider AI / NLP / IR community lost three key members, Chris Cieri, Dragomir Radev and Yorick Wilks. Their contributions and good spirit will not be forgotten but in each individual case it feels like the end of an era.