Upcoming Information Retrieval Conferences

I hope everyone who attended the recent SIGIR 2011 in Beijing had an excellent experience. I didn’t manage to make it to that side of the globe myself, but I’m looking forward to hearing back from my LinkedIn colleagues who were there — particularly Paul Ogilvie, who gave an invited talk at the first Workshop on Entity-Oriented Search (EOS) on “Anchoring Relevance with Entities”.

There are four outstanding information retrieval conferences coming up, and I will have the pleasure of participating in three of them. I’d like to make sure readers here are aware of all of them.

The first is KDD 2011, which will take place August 21-24, 2011 in San Diego, CA. The annual ACM SIGKDD conference is the premier international forum for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government to share their ideas, research results and experiences. KDD-2011 will feature keynote presentations, oral paper presentations, poster sessions, workshops, tutorials, panels, exhibits, demonstrations, and the KDD Cup competition. KDD-2011 will run from August 21-24 in San Diego, CA and will feature hundreds of practitioners and academic data miners converging on the one location.

I will not be attending KDD myself, but several of my colleagues will be there. In particular, Ron Bekkerman will be presenting a paper on “High-Precision Phrase-Based Document Classification on a Modern Scale”, as well as offering a tutorial on “Scaling Up Machine Learning: Parallel and Distributed Approaches”.

Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR 2011) – Mountain View, CA – October 20, 2011

The second is HCIR 2011, the fifth annual HCIR workshop, which I am co-organizing. It will be held all day on Thursday, October 20th, 2011 at Google’s main campus in Mountain View, California. There will be a reception on Wednesday evening before the workshop. Our keynote speaker this year will be Gary Marchionini, Dean of the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We are also excited to continue the HCIR Challenge, this year focusing on the problem of information availability, where the seeker faces uncertainty as to whether the information of interest is available at all. The corpus will be the CiteSeer digital library of scientific literature, which contains over 750,000 documents and provides rich meta-data about documents, authors, and citations.

Thanks to generous contributions made by Google, Microsoft Research, and Endeca, there will be no registration fee for HCIR this year. Information about how to register will be sent to authors of accepted position papers, research papers, and challenge reports. Note that the submission deadline has been extended by two weeks to Sunday, August 14th. I strongly encourage you to submit in one of these categories in you are working in this field.

The third is RecSys 2011, the 5th ACM International Conference on Recommender Systems. RecSys 2011 builds on the success of the Recommenders 06 Summer School in Bilbao, Spain and the series of four successful conference events from 2007 to 2010 in Minneapolis (2007), Lausanne (2008), New York (2009) and Barcelona (2010). In these events many members of the practitioner and research communities valued the rich exchange of ideas made possible by the shared plenary sessions. The 5th International conference will promote the same close interaction among practitioners and researchers.

I will be giving a tutorial at RecSys 2011 on “Recommendations as a Conversation with the User”.

The fourth is CIKM 2011, the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. It will take place in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, 24th-28th October 2011. Since 1992, the CIKM has successfully brought together leading researchers and developers from the database, information retrieval, and knowledge management communities. The purpose of the conference is to identify challenging problems facing the development of future knowledge and information systems, and to shape future research directions through the publication of high quality, applied and theoretical research findings. CIKM 2011 will continue the tradition of promoting collaboration among multiple areas in the general areas of databases, information retrieval, and knowledge management.

I am proud to be organizing the CIKM 2011 Industry Event, which will feature such industry heavyweights as Stephen Robertson (Microsoft Research), John Giannandrea (Google), Vanja Josifovski (Yahoo! Research), Ilya Segalovich (Yandex), Jeff Hammerbacher (Cloudera), and Chavdar Botev (LinkedIn).

I’m very excited about all four of these opportunities to exchange ideas about information retrieval and related areas, and I am grateful to LinkedIn for supporting my participation, as well as that of my colleagues. I hope to see some of you at these events!