SIGIR News

2013

Get ready for SIGIR 2013 in Dublin, Ireland!

SIGIR invites applications for student travel grants to help cover the cost of travel, living expenses, and registration to the SIGIR 2013 conference. Some student travel funds, the Donald B. Crouch Travel Grants, explicitly target students from developing countries. The deadline for applying for travel support is May 24th.

All contents that we gathered in ouri project "Saving the old IR literature" can now be accessed from a single page. Let us know if you are able to digitize old IR literature that is currently unavailable online.

2012

SIGIR Forum, December 2012 is available.

This year's best paper award was presented to Mark Smucker and Charles Clarke for their paper "Time-based calibration of effectiveness measures". The best student paper award was awarded to Shuzi Niu, Jiafeng Guo, Yanyan Lan, and Xueqi Cheng for their paper "Top-k learning to rank: labeling, ranking and evaluation". There was an honorable mention for Lidan Wang, Paul Bennett, and Kevyn Collins-Thompson for "Robust ranking models via risk-averse optimization".

ACM SIGIR honors Norbert Fuhr. For pioneering contributions to approaches that now dominate the search industry, ACM SIGIR honors Norbert Fuhr from the University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany) with the 2012 Gerard Salton Award. Fuhr developed probabilistic retrieval models for databases and XML, and his research on probabilistic models anticipated the current interest in learning to rank approaches in search operations. Fuhr receives the award at the ACM SIGIR Conference in Portland, Oregon, USA, where he gives the opening keynote address. Read more in the ACM Press release.

SIGIR Forum, June 2012 is available.

SIGIR invites applications for student travel grants to help cover the cost of travel, living expenses, and registration to the SIGIR 2012 conference. Some student travel funds, the Donald B. Crouch Travel Grants, explicitly target students from developing countries. The deadline for applying for travel support is June 12

SIGIR solicits expressions of interest in hosting the SIGIR 2016 conference, to be held around July of 2016 somewhere in Europe or Africa. Formal bids are not due until September 15th, but SIGIR encourages informal proposals at the SIGIR 2012 conference this August in Portland, Oregon. If you are interested in hosting SIGIR 2016, please contact the SIGIR Chair (chair_SIGIR@acm.org).

The SIGIR project Saving the Old IR Literature has scanned and released a new batch of historic IR papers, including early papers on the SMART system and papers on the development of test collections. The papers are written by amongst others: Gerard Salton, Karen Sparck Jones, William Cooper, Keith van Rijsbergen, Stepen Robertson, Martin Kay, Michael Lesk, and Nicolas Belkin.

ACM SIGIR has a limited number of $1K scholarships to award to worthy students to attend the ACM Turing Centenary Celebration, 15-16 June 2012, at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, CA. $500 of the award must be used to cover two nights stay at the Palace Hotel. The remaining balance will go toward travel expenses. Please contact Ian Soboroff.

2011

Get ready for SIGIR 2012 in Portland, Oregon, USA!

SIGIR Forum, December 2011 is available.

This year's best paper award was presented to Mikhail Ageev (Moscow State University), and Qi Guo, Dmitry Lagun, and Eugene Agichtein (Emory University) for their paper Find It If You Can: A Game for Modeling Different Types of Web Search Success Using Interaction Data in which they propose a principled formalization of different types of success for informational search, and a scalable game-like infrastructure for crowdsourcing search behavior studies.
The best student paper award was awarded to Shuang-Hong Yang (Georgia Institute of Technology), Bo Long and Alexander J. Smola (Yahoo! Labs), Hongyuan Zha (Georgia Institute of Technology), and Zhaohui Zheng (Yahoo! Labs Beijing) for their paper Collaborative Competitive Filtering: Learning Recommender using Context of User Choice. The paper proposes Collaborative Competitive Filtering (CCF), a framework for learning user preferences by modeling the choice process in recommender systems.
There were honorable mentions for the papers: Parameterized Concept Weighting in Verbose Queries, Understanding Re-fi nding Behaviour in Naturalistic Email Interaction Log, Out of sight, not out of mind: On the effect of social and physical detachment on information need, Enhanced Results for Web Search, and Recommending Ephemeral Items at Web Scale.

SIGIR solicits expressions of interest in hosting the SIGIR 2015 conference, to be held in the summer of 2015 somewhere in North or South America. Formal bids are not due until September 15th, but SIGIR encourages informal proposals at the SIGIR conference this summer in Beijing. If you are interested in hosting SIGIR 2015, please contact the SIGIR Chair (chair_SIGIR@acm.org). (All messages will be acknowledged, so try again a little later if you get no response.) If you wish to make an informal bid but cannot attend the conference, someone will make the presentation in your place.

SIGIR Forum, June 2011 is available.

SIGIR invites applications for Donald B. Crouch Travel Grants and Google travel awards for women to help cover the cost of travel, living expenses, and registration to the SIGIR 2011 conference. The deadline for applying for travel support is May 20

2010

Get ready for SIGIR 2011 in Beijing, China!

SIGIR Forum, December 2010 is available.

Ryen White and Jeff Huang received the best paper award at SIGIR 2010 for their paper "Assessing the Scenic Route: Measuring the Value of Search Trails in Web Logs". They present a log-based study estimating the user value of trail following. They demonstrate significant value to users in following trails, especially for certain query types. The findings have implications for the design of search systems, including trail recommendation systems that display trails on search result pages.

The best student paper is written by oannis Arapakis, Konstantinos Athanasakos, and Joemon Jose: "A comparison of general vs. personalized affective models for the prediction of topical relevance". They determined whether the behavioural differences of users have an impact on the models' ability to determine topical relevance, and if, by personalising them, accuracy can be improved.

Some of the old literature in the field is available from the Digital Museum of Information Retrieval Research. An overview of the museum contents can be found here.

SIGIR is soliciting bids to host the prestigious SIGIR conference in 2014. Locations in Asia and the Pacific Rim are eligible to bid. SIGIR expects that the general chairs of the conference have strong ties to the field of information retrieval and in particular to SIGIR. You are not required to have made a pitch at the SIGIR 2010 business meeting, though those groups will almost certainly be submitting bids. Deadline: Monday December 6, 2010. Contact one of the SIGIR officers t o learn about the exact procedure to bid for SIGIR.

SIGIR Forum, June 2010 is available.

2009

Get ready for SIGIR 2010 in Geneva!

SIGIR members Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Yahoo! Research), Jeffrey Dean (Google Inc.), Urs Hoelzle (Google Inc.), David Karger (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Yossi Matias (Google Inc.) have been elected as ACM fellows on December 1, 2009. The complete list of 2009 ACM Fellows can be found in the ACM Press release and at fellows.acm.org. Several other SIGIR members have been elected as distinguished members and senior members of the ACM. New distinguished ACM members in 2009 are: Frank Shipman, Peretz Shoval, Ellen Voorhees, and Chengxiang Zhai. New senior ACM members in 2009 are: Gene Golovchinsky, and Yuri Quintana.
Congratulations!

SIGIR Forum, December 2009 is available.

ACM SIGIR honors Susan Dumais
For her innovative contributions to information indexing and retrieval systems that have widely impacted the quality of search from the desktop to the Web, the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) has recognized Susan T. Dumais of Microsoft Research with the 2009 Gerard Salton Award. Her research and development of novel interfaces and algorithms have greatly improved document indexing and search techniques, helping to build an important bridge between human computer interaction and information retrieval. Dumais received the award on July 20, at the ACM SIGIR Conference in Boston, MA, where she gave the opening keynote address. Read more in the ACM Press release.

Jaime Arguello, Fernando Diaz, Jamie Callan, and Jean-Francois Crespo received the best paper award at SIGIR 2009 for their paper "Sources of evidence for vertical selection". They address the problem of vertical selection, predicting relevant verticals for queries issued to the search engine's main web search page making use of the query string, logs of queries previously issued directly to the vertical, and corpora representative of vertical content. As Jaime Arguello is a student, there is no separate best student paper awarded this year.

We saved the SIGIR 2006 pages for nostalgic reasons...

SIGIR 2012 will be in Portland, Oregon chaired by Bill Hersh. Five cities bid for SIGIR 2013, and made presentations. They are: Barcelona, Spain; Dublin, Ireland; Edinburgh, Scotland; Haifa, Israel; and Vienna, Austria. But first, get ready for SIGIR 2010 in Geneva and SIGIR 2011 in Bejing.

SIGIR Forum, June 2009 is available.

While it may seem a long way off, it is time for those sites interested in hosting SIGIR in 2013 to step up and make their pitch to the attendees at the Annual Business Meeting at SIGIR in Boston over lunch on Wednesday, July 22nd. Given the ternary rotation pattern we've established for holding our annual SIGIR Conferences, 2013 is the turn for Europe and Africa to bid.

The Annual ACM-SIGIR Business Meeting will be held during the SIGIR Conference on Wednesday, July 22nd from 12 to 2, during a free box lunch at the Conference site. There will be brief reports from the Executive Committee, more details of the 2010 (Geneva, Switzerland) and 2011 (Beijing, China) Conferences, revelation of where the SIGIR 2012 Conference will be held, and bids presented for SIGIR 2013 - with a show of hands by attendees as to preferences.

2008

Get ready for SIGIR 2009 in Boston!

SIGIR presents the first results of a project to digitize the older literature in the information retrieval field. So far 14 of the old reports, such as the Cranfield reports and the SMART reports have been scanned. The PDF versions of these are available from the Digital Museum of Information Retrieval Research.

SIGIR Forum, December 2008 is available.

SIGIR accepts nominations for the Salton Award to honor members of our community who have made ...significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval. The Salton award is awarded triennially at the SIGIR Conference: 2009 is a Salton year. The selection committee consists of the available past Salton Award winners. Nominations can be sent to the SIGIR Chair Elizabeth D. Liddy who coordinates the discussion and nomination.

SIGIR 2008 in Singpore was a great success. Best paper awards were handed at the SIGIR banquet. The best SIGIR 2008 paper is written by Jeremy Pickens, Gene Golovchinsky, Chirag Shah, Pernilla Qvarfordt, Maribeth Back. The best SIGIR 2008 student paper is written by Yuting Liu, Bin Gao, Tie-Yan Liu, Ying Zhang, Zhiming Ma, Shuyuan He, and Hang Li

The Digital Symposium Collection DVD-ROM is a SIGIR membership option for an additional $10 per year. Check your ACM membership renewal forms for details.

To save the SIGIR conference pages for generations to come, we archived some of them at: SIGIR 2002, SIGIR 2003, SIGIR 2004, and SIGIR 2007.

SIGIR Forum, June 2008 is available.

2007

Get ready for SIGIR 2008 in Singapore!

The SIGIR 2007 best paper is written by Ryen White, Mikhail Bilenko, and Silviu Cucerzan: Studying the Use of Popular Destinations to Enhance Web Search Interaction. The best student paper is written by D. Sculley and Gabriel Wachman: Relaxed online Support Vector Machines for spam filtering.