The Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA) 2023 symposium
was held on Friday 1 September 2023 in Vienna, Austria in conjunction with ESSIR 2023
. The purpose of FDIA is to provide Master and PhD students as well as early-
career researchers a platform to discuss their research and project ideas with experts in the field.
35 people attended the event with 9 mentors and 26 students. Six students presented their work,
which was peer-reviewed by the FDIA program committee. The presentations were very well
received and attracted lots of discussions and questions for each paper, from the mentors and peer
students. From the feedback of the attendees, we have learnt that people enjoyed the talks and the
discussion very much. People also liked the panel discussion session on career development, where
all mentors shared their career path and advice, and on future research directions of information
access, where both mentors and mentees discussed their views of current and future research
challenges and opportunities. The talks and discussion complemented the ESSIR schedule, where
established research is presented, with novel and fresh ideas, particularly in times when rapid
developments in generative AI are providing new opportunities and challenges. The half day event
seems to be short to many students. They suggested in their feedback to have a longer sessions with
more group discussions and a poster session, which we hope to implement in the future FDIAs.
The FDIA proceedings will be published at CEUR.
We, the three organisers Haiming Liu, Ingo Frommholz and Yashar Moshfeghi, would like to thank all
the students and mentors for their participation and contribution and would like to thank the ESSIR
2023 organisers Florina Piroi and Allan Hanbury for hosting the successful FDIA.