New Year, New Release (2024)

I am delighted to announce a new release of 2Dsearch, which includes a new feature we’re particularly excited about: the Search Strategy Generator. All you need do is enter your research question (in plain language) and 2Dsearch will identify the facets, offer suitable keyword suggestions and build your search for you, directly on the canvas.

This is great news for students (and many researchers) who, let’s face it, generally hate doing literature reviews and often avoid even trying to formulate a robust, accurate search strategy. But now, as long as you can articulate your research question, you’ll have a starting point which you can refine and modify, simply using drag and drop. And for the rest of us who are happy to create our own finely crafted strategies, well, who doesn’t like a head start for inspiration (or even an automated second opinion)?

What this means is that you can now use 2Dsearch to automatically generate and execute a single visual search across a multiple databases, and benefit from automated translations for many more. There’s lots more in this release, including many UX improvements and bug fixes, so we hope you enjoy checking it out. As always, 2Dsearch is free to use, whether you’re a student/researcher, an information professional or a recruiter/sourcing professional. We have more in the pipeline for the next release, so if you’d like to help shape this or have comments or suggestions then do let us know. We’d be delighted to hear from you. https://www.2dsearch.com/

 

Announcing the winners of the 2023 Search Industry Awards

On Wednesday last week I had the privilege of co-organising the 18^th Search Solutions conference, held at BCS London. As in previous years, the event included presentations, panels and keynote talks by influential industry leaders on novel and emerging topics in search and information retrieval. And in keeping with tradition, we were delighted to be able to announce the winners of this year’s BCS Search Industry Awards. In a special session held at the end of Search Solution 2023, it was my honour to announce the winners for the following categories:

Search Solutions 2023: lineup announced

In case you missed it, here is the line up for Search Solutions 2023, held at BCS London on 22-Nov-2023. Many thanks to Martin White and Michael Upshall for doing the heavy lifting on this. Hope to see you there?

Innovations in Search & Information Retrieval

Search Solutions is the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group’s annual event focused on practitioner issues in the arena of search and information retrieval. It is a unique opportunity to bring together academic research and practitioner experience.

The Search Solutions event consists of a Tutorial day and a Conference day, each of which has a separate registration.

Location

Both the Tutorials and the Conference take place at the BCS London Headquarters, Ground Floor, 25 Copthall Avenue EC2R 7BP. This is a 10 minute walk from Liverpool Street Station (Elizabeth Line and London Underground) and a 20 minute walk from London Bridge Station.

Registration form on Eventbrite

Conference fee

BCS Members and members of ISKO UK  £92 including VAT

Non-members  £110 including VAT

Students £80 including VAT

Programme outline

The objective of the conference this year is to explore the implications and opportunities of AI-based technologies in enhancing the user experience in enterprise, e-commerce and systematic search. The conference marks the first anniversary of the launch of ChatGPT on 30 November 2022.

09.45 Introductions

09.55 Understanding the Dangers of using LLMs. Professor Julie Weeds,  Professor in Artificial Intelligence, University of Sussex

10.30 Using AI tools for discovery Hong Zhou Wiley Scientific

11.00 Break

11.20 IR, AI and ‘search’ – Creating synergy  Steve Zimmerman Samy Ateia and Martin White consider the opportunities and the issues, with the assistance of the audience!

12..20 BCS Search Industry Awards  – Introduction Tony Russell-Rose

12.30 Panel Session looking back at the morning presentations

13.00 Lunch

13.45 Pragmatic AI-powered Search – Keeping it Simple, not Stupid . Charlie Hull Open Source Connections

14.15 Retrieval-augmented text generation (RAG) for legal IR Grace Lee

14.45 Ontologies in the age of AI-based discovery Peter Winstanley

15.15 Break

15.35 Presentation of the BCS Search Industry Awards

16.00 New technologies for systematic reviews: are large language models really a gamechanger? James Thomas

16.30 Integrating ChatGPT into existing applications Paul Cleverley

17.00 Panel session – agreeing the take-aways from the conference

17.30 SS2023 Best Paper Award

17.45 Reception

19.00 Close

For further details, contact irsg@bcs.org.uk.

New Informer – Autumn 2023

In case you missed it, here are details of the latest issue of Informer, which just came out this week with conference reviews, feature articles, news and updates from the world of search and information retrieval.

Of particular note is the call for a new editor – this is a great opportunity so if you’re interested or would like to know more, drop us a line. If a volunteer is not forthcoming, this could be the LAST issue of Informer. No, really!

For further details see the Informer website. If you fancy becoming a contributor, get in touch.

We have a vacancy for an Hourly Paid Lecturer

We have a vacancy for an Hourly Paid Lecturer 
 
We are looking for an hourly paid lecturer to help support #teaching on the MSc User Experience Engineering, for a 15 Credit Module named Interaction Science which is being delivered by the #computing Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. You will have 4 hours of contact with students for 10 weeks starting January 2024. 
 
This module is designed from the user’s perspective and aims to apply knowledge of human perceptual and cognitive abilities to optimize the design of interactive products and systems. This module will explore concepts from cognitive modelling to data visualization and interaction design practice. Students will apply a scientific understanding of human behavior to design an interactive prototype to demonstrate UX design principles which they will then evaluate using appropriate research methods. 

  
The Person 
We are looking for an enthusiastic lecturer with a relevant UX / HCI (Human Computer Interaction) background who has an inspiring approach to teaching. 
 
Ideal Attributes 

• A degree in HCI, cognitive psychology, UX design or a related discipline or industry experience 
• Teaching ability of relevant theory and practice to your subject 
• Experience in contemporary interaction design principles and practice 

• Experience with supporting diverse cohorts of students is desirable 
    

These elements will be taught in a way that is suitable for students without a mathematical or computer science background with a focus on cognitive psychology, interaction design and user experience. This module will be taught from a perspective that emphasizes the value of collaboration and group working. 
 
If you are interested in this exciting role, please email Dr. Tony Russell-Rose (truss003@gold.ac.uk) with your CV and a short covering letter outlining your suitability for the role. 

Goldsmiths UX Conference 2023

Last week we had our UX Conference at Goldsmiths, which is the annual event where our outgoing MSc cohort get to present the results of their final projects. It was wonderful to see so many excellent presentations but sad to say goodbye to such a talented group of students (although for the handful who will be staying on as teaching assistants it may be more a case or ‘au revoir’ 🙂

I’m sure you will all go on to achieve great things. Do keep in touch!

Announcing the BCS Search Industry Awards 2023

We are delighted to announce this year’s Search Industry Awards, celebrating the best search innovations of 2023. Presented by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the BCS, these awards recognize people, projects, and organizations around the world that have excelled in the design of search and information retrieval products and services.

If you know of any people, projects, or products that deserve recognition, let us know by submitting a nomination. Alternatively, if you’re involved with something special yourself, you can submit an application today.

PhD project topics 2023

I am recruiting sponsored or self-funded PhD students who wish to undertake projects in the areas of natural language processing, information retrieval and human-computer interaction including the project outlines listed below. 

I have also appended some more focused MSc-level project ideas based on current work with 2Dsearch. Some of these have the potential to be scalable to PhD level work, so feel free to adapt / enhance them to accommodate your own ideas and interests. Note also that this list is not exhaustive: we have other project ideas and proposals which are not quite ready for public dissemination. 

If you are a self-funded student considering a PhD in any of the topics below please look at the further information and/or email me to discuss. 

New Informer – Spring 2023

In case you missed it, here are details of the latest issue of Informer, which just came out this week. This is again one of our bigger issues, with over twenty articles including conference reviews, feature articles, news and updates from the world of search and information retrieval. Of particular note is the call for a new editor – this is a great opportunity so if you’re interested or would like to know more, drop us a line. For further details see the Informer website. If you fancy becoming a contributor, get in touch!

A prototype debugger for search strategies

In this video we explore how we might take ideas from the world of software engineering and apply them to the challenge of search strategy formulation. We demonstrate a prototype ‘debugger’ which provides insight into the behaviour of search strategies, helping users to inspect, understand and validate them. This work was completed in collaboration with Jingfan Zang as part of his Master’s thesis in User Experience Engineering and was accepted as a demo_paper at the ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2023).