CIKM 2011 is nearly a year away, but I wanted to give folks a heads up about the Industry Event there that I am organizing with Tony Russell-Rose. These events have become an an increasingly important part of the annual CIKM and SIGIR conferences, and I believe they are helping to bridge the gap between scholarship and practice. When I organized the SIGIR 2009 Industry Event, it was almost too popular — I felt bad for the parallel research presentations that had to compete with Matt Cutts and danah boyd for attendees!
But not so bad that I wouldn’t do it again! We have an outstanding line-up of invited talks for the CIKM 2011 Industry Event, featuring:
- Stephen Robertson (Microsoft Research)
- John Giannandrea (Google)
- Jeff Hammerbacher (Cloudera)
- Peter Jackson (Thomson Reuters)
For those not familiar with industry luminaries, that list includes one of the world’s most prominent information retrieval researchers, the founder of Metaweb (which created Freebase), the person who build Facebook’s data team (which developed Hive and Cassandra), and one of the leading industrial researchers on natural language processing. To borrow a sports metaphor, these were our first-round draft picks, and we are delighted that they all agreed to participate.
And those are just the keynotes! We’re also going to put out a call for participation soon, so watch this space!
The Noisy Channel 