HCIR 2010: A Pre-Announcement

We’re gearing up to officially announce the HCIR 2010 workshop, but I wanted to give folks here a heads up, as well as to put out a call for a volunteer.

The Fourth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval will take place on August 22nd at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. It will be an independent workshop as in previous years, but this year we are co-locating it with the Third Information Interaction in Context conference (IIiX 2010).

We’ve already lined up Google’s Dan Russell as a keynote speaker and are close to circulating a call for participation. We’re also planning to introduce something new to the workshop this year: an HCIR challenge! Participants will build applications around a specific data set that demonstrate the use of HCIR techniques. We’ll announce the data set and the challenge details as soon as we’ve confirmed the licensing details.

Meanwhile, we’re looking for a volunteer to help us build a baseline index for the challenge data set. Participants will be allowed–but not required–to use this index as a starting point for their entries. The volunteer should be comfortable using open-source packages Lucene or Solr. If you are interested in being that volunteer, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to share more details.