Long-time readers know that I have strong opinions about academic conferences. I find the main value of conferences and workshops to be facilitating face-to-face interaction among researchers and practitioners who share professional interests. An offline version of LinkedIn, if you will. This year, I’m focusing my attention on three conferences: RecSys, HCIR, and CIKM. Regrettably I [...]

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As we get ready for the Sixth Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval this October in Cambridge, MA, people around the world are working on their entries for the third HCIR Challenge. Our first HCIR Challenge in 2010 focused on exploratory search of a news archive. Thanks to the generosity of the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), we [...]

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