SIGIR: Meet the Who’s Who of Search and Information Retrieval

Matt Cutts. danah boyd. Bruce Croft. Marti Hearst. What do these people have in common? If you’re thinking that they are some of the biggest names in the research and practice of search and information retrieval, then you have at least part of the answer. For full credit, the answer is that they are some of the people who will be presenting during the SIGIR Industry Track on Wednesday, July 22nd at the Sheraton Boston Hotel.

There have been some changes from the original program. As noted above, Bruce Croft and Marti Hearst are now participating. They will offer research counterpoints to the panels of industry practitioners (vendors and analysts). Autonomy bowed out of the vendor panel; instead, we’re including Raul Valdes-Perez, the executive chairman (and founder) of Vivisimo. We also received regrets from the Open Calais folks at Thomson Reuters; instead, we’ll hear from Evan Sandhaus, semantic technologist at the New York Times.

Here is the full list of participants, in order of appearance:

• Matt Cutts, Head of Webspam Team, Google
• danah boyd, Social Media Researcher, Microsoft
• Vanja Josifovski, Principal Research Scientist, Yahoo!
• Evan Sandhaus, Semantic Technologist, New York Times
• Tip House, Chief Architect, OCLC
• Whit Andrews, VP and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
• Susan Feldman, VP of Search and Discovery Technologies, IDC
• Theresa Regli, Principal, CMS Watch
• Marti Hearst, Professor, University of California, Berkeley
• Jeff Fried, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft (FAST)
• Raul Valdes-Perez, Executive Chairman, Vivisimo
• Adam Ferrari, Chief Technology Officer, Endeca
• Bruce Croft, Distinguished Professor, University of Massachusetts
• Elizabeth Liddy, Dean and Trustee Professor, Syracuse University

If you’re registered for the full SIGIR conference, then you are entitled to attend any or all of the Industry Track at no additional charge.

Otherwise, there’s also a one-day registration option for people only interested in attending the Industry Track. The cost for that one-day option is $350 (half of that for students). I should be able to get you the early registration rate of $300 if you contact me as soon as possible, and I can try to negotiate a group rate if a company want to send at least four people.

If you live in the Boston area and are interested in search and information retrieval (or you know people who are), this is an incredible opportunity to see the worlds of research and practice come together. I’m excited to be organizing it, and looking forward to attending it. If you have not yet registered but are interested in attending, please let me know ASAP, and I’ll see what I can do.