Awards

Awards open for nominations Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award – nominations close on 12 September The British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the BCS created an award in 2008 to commemorate the achievements of Karen Spärck Jones. The Award is sponsored by Microsoft Research. For more information… Continue reading Awards

Conference reports

ISKO 2019 Meeting The Human Position in an Artificial World: creativity, ethics and AI in knowledge organization ISKO UK’s sixth biennial conference was held at City, University of London on 15-16th July 2019 and was attended by 75 participants from 14 countries. David Haynes, Chairman of ISKOUK has kindly provided this summary of the meeting… Continue reading Conference reports

Events: Summer

One Day Events Search Solutions 2019: Out annual practitioner focused get together held on 25th and 26th November 2019. Tutorials are held on the 25th and the main event is on the 26th. A date for your diary! Conferences/Workshops EPIA’2019: 18th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Includes a number of themes including a track TEMA’19:… Continue reading Events: Summer

Profile: Glasgow Information Retrieval Group

The Glasgow Information Retrieval Group within the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow was founded 32 years ago in 1986 by Professor C. J. ‘Keith’ van Rijsbergen, often considered one of the founders of modern Information Retrieval (IR). From its outset, the Glasgow IR group has focused on improving the effectiveness of… Continue reading Profile: Glasgow Information Retrieval Group

Syria’s First Web Search Engine: An Interview with Shadi Saleh

This interview was conducted by on Saturday, July 13, 2019 (editing for brevity and language jointly by the interviewer and interviewee.) Jochen Leidner: Today, I have on the line Shadi Saleh, co-founder of the first-ever Web search engine in Syria. I met Shadi at ECIR 2019 [the 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval] in Cologne,… Continue reading Syria’s First Web Search Engine: An Interview with Shadi Saleh

Advances in Search: Trip Report from ECIR 2019 (Cologne, April 2019)

by Jochen L. Leidner and Ingo Frommholz SIGIR 2019 in Paris in July. This is a report of some of the highlights of ECIR this year with no claims of representativeness. Part I – Impressions and general Trends Search is alive and happy as a field of research.  Both theoretical and applied papers were presented,… Continue reading Advances in Search: Trip Report from ECIR 2019 (Cologne, April 2019)

And finally…

I was delighted to note that Donna Harman has contributed a paper entitled Information Retrieval: the early years to the Now Publishing Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval https://www.nowpublishers.com/article/Details/INR-065. It is easy to focus on the future and not appreciate the long history of the development of information retrieval. Many of the core elements of… Continue reading And finally…

Editorial

It is an honour to have been appointed as Editor of Informer in succession to Udo Kruschwitz. The first time I saw a real-time computer-based search service was at 10am on 23 February 1976. If you are wondering how I can be that precise over forty years later the secret is that at the time… Continue reading Editorial

Conference Review – Haystack US 2019 – Relevance Avengers Assemble!

Last year I attended the Haystack search relevance conference in Charlottesville, USA as a guest of our partners OpenSource Connections (OSC). In 2019 we merged my old business Flax with OSC so I returned as one of the conference organisers. Haystack is a conference all about search relevance – making sure that the results your users see fit… Continue reading Conference Review – Haystack US 2019 – Relevance Avengers Assemble!