------------------------------------------------------------------------ SIGIR 2007 Final News letter, August 2007 The 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference 23-27 July 2007, Amsterdam ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In this edition: 1. SIGIR conference a major success 2. Relive SIGIR 2007 on Flickr 3. Farcast reporter identifies himself 4. SIGIR 2007 proceedings online in ACM digital library 5. Karen Spärck Jones video online 6. SIGIR 2007 best paper awards 7. Who is the center of the SIGIR universe? 8. MySIGIR, for anything else you want to know about SIGIR 9. Get ready for SIGIR 2008! 10. Important dates ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1. SIGIR conference a major success With 490 paper submissions, 85 accepted paper, and over 700 SIGIR participants, of which exactly 599 registered for the main conference, SIGIR 2007 has been one of the biggest SIGIR conferences ever. Many thanks to all participants for making SIGIR in the Netherlands a major success. Special thanks go to the ACM and all supporting organizations for their significant contribution to SIGIR 2007. SIGIR 2007 is sponsored by ACM and has received generous financial support from over 20 companies and organizations to date. Microsoft and Google support at the Diamond level, Yahoo!, Collexis, Ask.com, and Q-go provide Gold support, IBM Research and Matrixware are Silver supporters, Textkernel, SAP, Nokia, Endeca, WCC and Fredhopper take part at the Bronze level, and Cambridge University Press, Elsevier B.V., Springer and Now Publishers exhibit their products. TNO, Stichting MultimediaN, Vereniging Werkgemeenschap Informatie- wetenschap (WGI) and the PASCAL Network of Excellence support the new SIGIR Industry Event financially, and the Dutch research school for Information and Knowledge Systems (Siks) sends its students to our tutorials. SIGIR.07 was organized in association with the following European organizations: BCS IRSG (UK), Werkgemeenschap Informatiewetenschap (NL), ARIA (F), GI-FGIR (D). Finally, the local organization of SIGIR.07 depends on the facilities and support of ACM, CWI, TNO ICT, University of Twente, University of Amsterdam and Thaesis. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2. Relive SIGIR 2007 on Flickr Want to relive SIGIR?, or find out the things you missed in the busy conference schedule? Nir Nussbaum has put some excellent photos from SIGIR 2007 on Flickr. For more information, go to: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sigir2007 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3. Farcast reporter identifies himself On http://sigir.farcast.nl you find photos made by a Farcast reporter by means of a mobile phone and the Farcast Reporter service. Farcast enables users to create and publish a weblog posting consisting of text, photos, video or audio annotated with location coordinates directly from a mobile phone at the press of a button. Interestingly, the reports on Farcast give some interesting looks behind the scenes of SIGIR, such as an empty Beurs van Berlage and the mysterious secret "past chairs diner"... Our Farcast reporter identifies himself on the last picture taken. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4. SIGIR 2007 proceedings in ACM digital library The full text of the SIGIR proceedings is now available via the ACM digital library. Go to http://portal.acm.org/toc.cfm?id=1277741 You may make digital or hard copies of the individual articles that you are entitled to access for personal or classroom use, as long as the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and they bear the ACM copyright notice. You may assemble and distribute links that point to works in the ACM Digital Library. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 5. Karen Spärck Jones video online Many have asked for an online version of the Athena Lecture by Karen Spärck Jones. The video can be found in the ACM Digital Library: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1277741.1277743 and on the Cambridge Computer Laboratory page: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/misc/obituaries/sparck-jones/video/ Professor Karen Spärck Jones. health did not permit her to receive the ACM Athena Award and BCS Lovelace Medal in person, so she prepared this video recorded talk instead. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 6. SIGIR 2007 best paper awards As each year, the best paper awards were handed at the SIGIR banquet. This year's best paper is written by Ryen White, Mikhail Bilenko, and Silviu Cucerzan: "Studying the Use of Popular Destinations to Enhance Web Search Interaction". They present a novel Web search interaction feature which, for a given query, provides links to websites frequently visited by other users with similar information needs. These popular destinations complement traditional search results, allowing direct navigation to authoritative resources for the query topic. The best student paper is written by D. Sculley and Gabriel Wachman: "Relaxed online Support Vector Machines for spam filtering." They developed a fast online Support Vector Machine variant called Relaxed Online SVMs. The method gives state of the art performance on spam classification, at greatly reduced computational cost. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 7. Who is the center of the SIGIR universe? Last year, in Seattle, Jon Kleinberg gave a keynote speech about social networks, incentives and search. In social networks, it is not about what you do, how much you do, or where you're from, it is about who you know. To celebrate SIGIR's 30th anniversary, we analysed all SIGIR proceedings and built a social network in which SIGIR authors are the nodes and edges are added between nodes if two authors co-authored a SIGIR paper together. The author that is most central in the network, is the one that has the shortest average distance to all other authors, where the distance is 1 if two authors wrote a SIGIR paper together, it is 2 if the first author wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with the second author, etc. It turns out that the center of the SIGIR universe is Wensi Xi from Google. Congrats Wensi! More info on: http://www.sigir2007.org/search/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8. MySIGIR, for anything else you want to know about SIGIR For the first time this year, SIGIR 2007 offered its MySIGIR community portal at http://my.sigir2007.org to all registered participants. On mySIGIR, questions, answers and discussions related to SIGIR in the Netherlands are gathered. For instance tips on visiting Amsterdam, personal SIGIR blog/notebook posts, post questions, slides of presenters, conference pictures, and much much more. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 9. Get ready for SIGIR 2008! SIGIR 2008 takes place from 20 to 25 July 2008 in Singapore. Singapore, popularly known as "The Garden City", is situated at the southern tip of the Malaysian Peninsula in South-East Asia. With a rich and interesting history tracking back from 1819, Singapore is a small but prosperous cosmopolitan nation diversified with 4 main ethnic groups, namely, Chinese, Malays, Indians and Eurasians. With museums exhibiting rich collection of historical information and relics as contrasted to the fun theme parks, holidaying spots as well as bustling shopping and dining heavens, Singapore is an excellent utopia to unwind from the daunting stress of today's society. See you in Singapore! More info on http://www.sigir2008.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 10. Important dates 18 November 2007: Mentoring program deadline 21 January 2008: Paper abstracts due 28 January 2008: Full research papers due 24 February 2008: Poster, demo, tutorial, and workshop submissions due 2 March 2008: Doctoral consortium submissions due 13 April 2008: Notification of Acceptance 20-25 July 2008: Conference in Singapore