Just in case you missed it, here are details of the latest issue of Informer, which came out on this week. This is one of our biggest issues, with 16 articles including conference reviews, feature articles, news and updates in the world of search and information retrieval. Big shout out to my colleague Steve Zimmerman for publishing this issue and putting together the flyer below. For further details see the Informer website. Or if you fancy becoming a contributor, get in touch!
BCS Informer: Summer 2020 Issue Out Now
To start with:
- An opening editorial from Martin White provides a very nice introduction to the current edition.
- IntraTeam provides results and outcomes from a study that considers the state of enterprise search satisfaction in Scandinavian organisations.
- A tribute to the contributions and career of Professor Peter Willett is provided. Peter recently retired from the Information School at The University of Sheffield and made extensive contributions to IR and bibliometrics.
Search Solutions 2020 Goes Virtual:
- The always excellent Search Solutions one day conference will go virtual this year. Normally held at the BCS offices in London, the virtual approach offers an excellent opportunity for those not normally able to attend to participate this year. If you are interested in attending and/or presenting please see the full details for Search Solutions 2020.
- Search Solutions also holds practitioner tutorials alongside the main conference. These will also be held virtually, and offer another chance from those further afield to run a tutorial online. If you are interested in running a tutorial, the conference is seeking proposals. Tutorials in previous years have included: Designing Usability for Search, Multimedia Information Retrieval, Pattern Search, City Search in SmartCities and Text Analysis.
Conferences and Virtual Experiences:
- Experiences are provided by the chair of International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO UK) regarding the technical challenges of delivering virtual learning.
- Microsoft Research held its future of work conference August 3-5th. Martin White enlightens us with some of his experiences in the first installment of a two piece series on this conference.
- An excellent account of BIRDS, an interdisciplinary workshop for students, practitioners and researchers in Data Science, Information Retrieval and Information Science held at SIGIR 2020.
- Though most of the great coverage of ECIR 2020 was published in the previous issue, one remaining write up on the keynote address by Joana Gonçalves de Sá is given squeaked through and is in our current issue.
- There are many more conferences planned, and Andy MacFarlane gives an updated schedule and list of future events (with the caveat that things can change quickly).
Book Reviews:
- For those of you that regularly run (or have an interest in) A/B tests, an excellent review of the recently published book by Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang and Ya Xu should not be overlooked.
- Systematic Searching – Practical Ideas for Improving Results is another recently published book and quite relevant to researchers in IR and IS. Most of the authors work in clinical review and therefore look at search through a somewhat specific but important lens. Have a look at the review given by Martin White.
And more:
- There is still time to nominate a Taxonomy Practitioner and a Taxonomy Success of the Year in association with the upcoming London Taxonomy Boot Camp.
- Nominations are also open for the prestigious Tony Kent Strix Award. This award has been given annually for over 20 years.
- The Kent Strix Annual Memorial Lecture is scheduled (Thursday 26th of November). Those of you paying attention will note this is the day after Search Solutions, so consider attending both!
- And finally, Martin White provides a list of individuals in the UK that he suggests have made a distinguished contribution to information retrieval. Martin challenges you to suggest names that he may have missed
Opportunities for Authors
If you are an expert in information retrieval or any aspect of search who has strong writing skills, we invite you to contribute to Informer. Please send an article proposal to us at: irsg@bcs.org.
For more information about the BCS IRSG, please go to: http://irsg.bcs.org/about.php
About Informer
Informer is the quarterly newsletter of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG). Its aim is to provide insights and inspiration to researchers and professionals working in all aspects of search and information retrieval. Our articles provide accessible and timely coverage of important topics, ranging from focused, practical advice, to concise overviews of broader topics, and to deeper, research-oriented articles and opinion pieces.
The IRSG is a Specialist Group of BCS. Its mission is to provide a focus for the European IR community, facilitate communication between researchers and practitioners and promote the adoption of IR research within industry. We host a major European conference (ECIR) and provide an associated programme of workshops, seminars and events. The IRSG is free to join via the BCS website, which provides access to further IR articles, events and resources.
BCS is the industry body for IT professionals. With members in over 100 countries around the world, BCS is the leading professional and learned society in the field of computers and information systems.
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Visit Informer at http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/
If you have comments, questions, or suggestions for Informer, please contact us at irsg@bcs.org.uk
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