BIRDS is an interdisciplinary workshop for students, practitioners and researchers in Data Science, Information Retrieval and Information Science held at SIGIR 2020. The aim of BIRDS was to foster the cross-fertilization of Information Science (IS), Information Retrieval (IR) and Data Science (DS). The idea behind BIRDS was the observation that all disciplines operate in the… Continue reading Free as the BIRDS — Bridging the Gap between Information Science, Information Retrieval and Data Science
ECIR 2020 Keynote Joana Gonçalves de Sá
[Note from the Editor – this is the third of the three ECIR 2020 keynotes. Summaries of the keynotes given by Chirag Shah and Jamie Callum can be found in the Spring 2020 issue of Informer] Joana Gonçalves de Sá is an Associate Professor at Nova School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa… Continue reading ECIR 2020 Keynote Joana Gonçalves de Sá
Book Review – Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing
One of the benefits of web technology is that it is relatively easy to make design changes to a web site or intranet both at the development stage and even when in production. The same is true of course of open source enterprise applications, such as e-commerce and enterprise search. In principle it seems so… Continue reading Book Review – Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing
Book Review – Systematic Searching
The first of my fourteen books was published in 1981 and was entitled ‘Profit from Information’. It was one of the first in a series of monographs published by the Institute of Information Scientists and was about how to set up and run an information broking business. Information broking companies started to spring up in… Continue reading Book Review – Systematic Searching
Taxonomy Boot Camp 2020 Awards
There’s still time to make a nomination for London’s Taxonomy Boot Camp 2020 Awards which highlight practitioners and organisations working with taxonomies today. In a year that has presented everyone with new challenges, the organisers are keen to showcase the great work being done by those in the taxonomy community, particularly examples of creativity, determination… Continue reading Taxonomy Boot Camp 2020 Awards
The Tony Kent Strix Award 2020: a call for nominations
The UK e-information Group (UKeiG), is pleased to announce a call for nominations for the prestigious Tony Kent Strix Award 2020. Nominations should be received by 6 pm GMT on Friday 25th September 2020. The Tony Kent Strix Award was inaugurated in 1998 by the Institute of Information Scientists. It is now presented by UKeiG… Continue reading The Tony Kent Strix Award 2020: a call for nominations
Strix Annual Memorial Lecture 26 November 2020
The Strix Memorial Lecture will be given by Professor Ingemar Cox, Head of Media Futures Research Group at University College London and a Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen. His current research interests include information retrieval and data analytics of online social media, twitter and query logs. The Lecture… Continue reading Strix Annual Memorial Lecture 26 November 2020
Events Summer 2020
Note: Due to the COVID-19 crisis some events have been cancelled, postponed or will be run virtually. We have provided information on each of the events with the current status at the time of writing. Please check the URL of the event for further details.
And finally
The biography of Peter Willett in this issue started me thinking about other distinguished UK-based contributors who had made a significant contribution to information retrieval. The list below is a personal one, and if you feel that I have missed anyone please do respond.
Editorial
I make no apology for making this an ECIR 2020 Conference Special Issue. It was a miracle that the conference took place at all given the short notice the organisers had that an in-Lisbon event was not going to be allowed to take place. The quality of the papers was uniformly high and the technology… Continue reading Editorial