Events

Call for Bids to Host CLEF 2019 - September 2019

2017-04-13T08:17:42Z

The CLEF Steering Committee solicits proposals from groups interested in organizing the CLEF conference and labs in September 2019.

CLEF 2019 will be a special edition marking the 20th anniversary of the CLEF Initiative.

Guidelines on submitting a bid can be found in the Template for Bids available at: http://www.clef-initiative.eu/documents/71612/87713/CLEF-Initiative-Template_for_bids.docx

Bids must be submitted by Friday, July 7th 2017 by email to the Steering Commitee Chair Nicola Ferro (chair@clef-initiative.eu).

The Steering Committee will review and select the proposals. The Steering Committee can ask for modifications and changes to the proposals, if deemed necessary. Interested parties can contact the Steering Committee Chair Nicola Ferro (chair@clef-initiative.eu) to receive further details.

Important Dates

- Bid submission deadline: July 7th, 2017

- Feedback to bidders and discussion: early August 2017

- Bid selection: late August 2017

CfP - Special issue on Reproducibility in Information Retrieval - Submission Deadline: 8 September 2017

2017-04-08T10:40:23Z

Call for Papers - Special issue on Reproducibility in Information Retrieval

ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality (ACM JDIQ)

Submission Deadline: 8 September 2017

Full CfP at: http://jdiq.acm.org/JDIQ_callfor_si_02-2017.pdf

Guest editors

Nicola Ferro, University of Padua, Italy, ferro@dei.unipd.it

Norbert Fuhr, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, norbert.fuhr@uni-due.de

Andreas Rauber, Technical University of Vienna, Austria, rauber@ifs.tuwien.ac.at

Aim

Information Retrieval is a discipline that has been strongly rooted in experimentation since its inception. Experimental evaluation has always been a strong driver for IR research and innovation, and these activities have been shaped by large scale evaluation campaigns such as TREC, CLEF, NTCIR and FIRE.

IR systems are getting more and more complex. They need to cross language and media barriers; they span from unstructured, to semi-structured to highly structured data; and they are faced with diverse and complex user information needs, search tasks, and societal challenges. As a consequence, evaluation and experimentation, which has remained a fundamental element, has in turn become increasingly sophisticated and challenging.

In this context, repeatability, reproducibility, and generalizability of experiments and results cannot be taken for granted. Indeed we need to emphasize these aspects as key requirements, if we wish to continue to reliably and durably advance research and technology in the field. In turn, we need to actively pursue them as a core part of our experimental methodology and practice.

In this special issue of JDIQ, we aspire to provide an overview of innovative research at the intersection of information retrieval and data quality, from theory to practice, with a focus on challenges, solutions, and experiences in reproducibility of IR experimental results.

Topics

Specific topics within the scope of the call include, but are not limited to, the following:

- Analysis of reproducibility challenges in system-oriented evaluation.

- Analysis of reproducibility challenges in user-oriented evaluation.

- General reproducibility frameworks for IR.

- Lessons learned in reproducing third-party experiments.

- Reproducibility of query results.

- Reproducibility challenges on private or proprietary data.

- Reproducibility challenges on ephemeral data, like streaming data, tweets, etc.

- Reproducibility challenges on online experiments, e.g., A/B testing.

- Reproducibility in evaluation campaigns.

- Evaluation infrastructures and Evaluation as a Service (EaaS).

- Experiment data management, data curation, and data quality.

- Data models, semantic or not, for IR experimental data.

- Reproducible experimental workflows: tools and experiences.

- Quality of IR experimental data.

- Data Citation: citing experimental data, dynamic data sets, samples, and statistical analyses.

Expected contributions

We welcome the following two types of contributions:

- Research manuscripts reporting mature results [25+ pages].

- Experience papers that report on lessons learned from addressing specific issues towards improved quality and reproducibility of experimental results [12+ pages plus an optional appendix].

If this is an extension of prior published work, then submitted manuscripts must contain at least 30% new material, and the significant new contributions must be clearly identified in the introduction.

Submission guidelines with Latex (preferred) or Word templates are available here: http://jdiq.acm.org/authors.cfm#subm

Important dates

- Initial submission: Friday September 8, 2017

- First review: Thursday December 7, 2017

- Revised manuscripts: Friday March 9, 2018

- Second review: Friday May 11, 2018

- Camera-ready manuscripts: Friday July 13, 2018

- Publication: Late October 2018

Report on 15 Years of CLEF published in SIGIR Forum, December 2014 issue

2014-12-01T13:16:06Z

A report briefly summarizing the activities and main outcomes of CLEF in its first fifteen years has been published in SIGIR Forum

Ferro, N. (2014). CLEF 15th Birthday: Past, Present, and Future. SIGIR Forum, 48(2):31–55.

Online Version

Lectures of the PROMISE Winter School 2013 "Bridging Between Information Retrieval and Databases" have been published as Springer LNCS Tutorial

2014-10-30T12:59:21Z

Revised lectures of the PROMISE Winter School 2013 - Bridging between Information Retrieval and Databases have been published as an LNCS Tutorial book.

Ferro, N., editor (2014). Bridging Between Information Retrieval and Databases - PROMISE Winter School 2013, Revised Tutorial Lectures. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 8173, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany.

Online Version

Call for Bids to Host CLEF 2016 - September 2016

2013-12-13T11:13:49Z

The CLEF Steering Committee solicits proposals from groups interested in organizing the CLEF conference and labs in September 2016.

Guidelines on submitting a bid can be found in the Template for Bids available at:

http://www.clef-initiative.eu/documents/71612/87713/CLEF-Initiative-Template_for_bids.docx

Bids must be submitted by Friday, April 11th 2014 by email to the Steering Commitee Chair Nicola Ferro (chair@clef-initiative.eu).

The Steering Committee will review and select the proposals. The Steering Committee can ask for modifications and changes to the proposals, if deemed necessary.

Interested parties can contact the Steering Committee Chair Nicola Ferro (chair@clef-initiative.eu) to receive further details.

Important Dates

Bid submission deadline: April 11th, 2014
Feedback to bidders and discussion: April - May 2014
Bid selection: June 2014

Lectures of the PROMISE Winter School 2012 "Information Retrieval Meets Information Visualization" have been published as Springer LNCS Tutorial

2013-02-10T17:59:48Z

Revised lectures of the PROMISE Winter School 2012 - Information Retrieval Meets Information Visualization have been published as an LNCS Tutorial book.

Agosti, M., Ferro, N., Forner, P., Müller, H., and Santucci, G., editors (2013). Information Retrieval Meets Information Visualization - PROMISE Winter School 2012, Revised Tutorial Lectures. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 7757, Springer, Heidelberg, Germany.

Online Version

PROMISE Technology Transfer Day - 5 - 9 March 2013, CeBIT, Hannover, Germany

2013-01-23T14:18:39Z

The aim of the PROMISE Technology Transfer Day is to put researchers, software developers and users together in order to facilitate a two-way communication of research advances and results by researchers, as well as the reverse flow of requirements and ideas from users and developers. The final goal is to stimulate the discussion on Information Access technolo-gies and provide a forum in which invited speakers can share their experiences, identify common strategies and needs, and detect future challenges in this field.

Registration

Participation in the event is free of charge but subject to registration.

As the number of attendees is limited due to space constraints, please note that registration is binding, and will grant admission ticket to CeBIT and access to buffet lunch and afternoon coffee break.

Please register HERE to confirm your attendance by 25th February 2013.

PROMISE Winter School 2013 "Bridging between Information Retrieval and Databases" - Call for Participation

2012-11-07T18:41:50Z

The PROMISE Winter School 2013 will be held in Bressanone - Italy on 4 - 8 February 2013

The aim of the Promise Winter School on "Bridging between Information Retrieval and Databases" is to give participants a grounding in the core topics that constitute the multidisciplinary area of information access and retrieval to unstructured, semistructured, and structured information.
The idea of the school stems from the observation that nowadays databases are more and more getting into techniques that have traditionally been typical of information retrieval and, viceversa, information retrieval is using more and more database-oriented techniques.

The school mainly targets PhD and Master students but all other researchers or participation from industry is welcome. Some scholarships are available and prices are kept reasonable to allow for a wide participation.

Important Dates

Registration deadline: 20 December 2012
Winter School: 4 - 8 February 2013

Registration

To register, please follow the link http://www.promise-noe.eu/events/winter-school-2013/registration-and-accomodation.

Call for Bids to Host CLEF 2015 - The Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum - September 2015

2012-09-27T16:14:46Z

The CLEF Steering Committee solicits proposals from groups interested in organizing the CLEF conference and labs in September 2015.

Guidelines on submitting a bid can be found in the Template for Bids available at:

http://www.clef-initiative.eu/documents/71612/87713/CLEF-Initiative-Template_for_bids.docx

Bids must be submitted by Friday, April 5th 2013 by email to the Steering Commitee Chair Nicola Ferro (chair@clef-initiative.eu).

The Steering Committee will review and select the proposals. The Steering Committee can ask for modifications and changes to the proposals, if deemed necessary.

Interested parties can contact the Steering Committee Chair Nicola Ferro (chair@clef-initiative.eu) to receive further details.

Important Dates

Bid submission deadline: April 5th, 2013
Feedback to bidders and discussion: April - May 2013
Bid selection: June 2013

Next CLEFs: CLEF 2013 in Valencia and CLEF 2014 in Sheffield

2012-12-14T17:30:52Z

The next editions of CLEF will be as follows:

CLEF 2013
- 23 - 26 September 2013
- Technical University of Valencia, Spain
- More information soon on the CLEF 2013 Web site
CLEF 2014
- 15 - 18 September 2014
- University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

New Schedule for CLEF 2013 and 2014 is available on line

2012-09-23T15:21:07Z

During CLEF 2012 in Rome, Italy, it has been decided to re-schedule the overall yearly cycle of CLEF in order to allow for having a single publication reporting both the conference papers and the labs overview ready by and delivered at the annual CLEF meeting.

Information about the new CLEF schedule are available at:

CLEF Plans and New Schedule (http://www.clef-initiative.eu/documents/71612/afbd989d-06fb-418c-a7d1-a8e84280131d).

The PROMISE Retreat 2012 report on Prospects and Opportunities for Information Access Evaluation is online

2012-09-11T17:43:51Z

The report of the PROMISE retreat that took place in Padua, Italy, 30th--31st May 2012, is now available online at:

http://www.promise-noe.eu/promise-retreat-report-2012/.

The PROMISE network of excellence organized a two-days brainstorming workshop to discuss and envisage future directions and perspectives for the evaluation of information access and retrieval systems in multiple languages and multiple media.
25 researchers from 10 different European countries attended the event, covering many different research areas – information retrieval, information extraction, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, semantic technologies, information visualization and visual analytics, system architectures, and so on.
The ultimate goal of the PROMISE retreat is to stimulate and involve the research community along the identified research lines and to provide funding agencies with effective and scientifically sound ideas for coordinating and supporting information access research.

The SWIRL 2012 report on Frontiers, Challenges, and Opportunities for Information Retrieval is online

2012-05-12T05:21:42Z

The report of the SWIRL 2012: The Second Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval in Lorne, that took place in Lorne, Australia, from 15--17th February 2012, is now aviable online at:

SIGIR Forum, 46(1):2-32, June 2012;
SWIRL 2012 workshop Web site.

SWIRL 2012: The Second Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval in Lorne

2012-02-16T10:19:40Z

The SWIRL 2012: The Second Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval in Lorne takes place in Lorne, Australia, from 15--17th February 2012.

The purpose of this workshop is to explore the long-range issues of the field, to recognize challenges that are on -- or even over -- the horizon, to build consensus on some of the key challenges, and to disseminate the resulting information to the research community. Our intent is that this description of open problems will inspire researchers and graduate students to address the questions, and will provide funding agencies data to focus and coordinate support for information retrieval research.

Collaborative Information Seeking: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice

2011-11-22T14:12:39Z

CIS'11 October 2011 - New Orleans, Louisiana

Overview

The notion that information seeking is not always a solitary activity, and that people working in collaboration for information intensive tasks should be studied and supported, has become more prevalent in the recent years than ever before. The field of collaborative information seeking is re-emerging, and bringing many researchers and practitioners from various disciplines. We invite you to join a small and motivated set of such participants in a workshop with the theme of "Collaborative Information Seeking: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice". The workshop will focus on theoretical foundations of collaborative information seeking (CIS) as well as its applications, and provide an excellent platform for learning about collaborative/social aspects of information seeking as well as discuss various challenges and opportunities.

More details at : http://collab.infoseeking.org/events/asist2011workshop/

PROMISE session at CLEF 2011: "The PROMISE evaluation infrastructure, where Visual Analytics meets Information Retrieval"

2011-08-01T09:08:58Z

The session is part of CLEF 2011 program. It will describe the overall PROMISE infrastructure architecture, pointing out the role that a Visual Analytics component will play in such a context in order to understand and make sense of the huge amount of measures and other experimental data that an automated environment will quickly host.

The session foresees both oral presentations and live demos, demonstrating the basic ideas behind the PROMISE project: data management, data visualization and analysis, and interaction.

Speakers

Giuseppe Santucci - The PROMISE NoE
Marco Dussin - The PROMISE Infrastructure
Giuseppe Santucci - The role of Visual Analytics within experimental evaluation campaigns
Ivano Masiero and Giuseppe Tino - Novel visualizations for Information Retrieval
Guido Lorenzo Granato - The PROMISE Visual Analytics Architecture

Demos

Accessing the PROMISE Data
Analyzing experimental data with interactive visualizations
A Visual Analitycs environment for the comparison of ranked result cumulated gains

PROMISE Winter School 2012 "Information Retrieval meets Information Visualization"

2011-07-07T07:12:24Z

The PROMISE Winter School 2012 will be held in Zinal, Valais - Switzerland on 23 - 27 January 2012

The aim of the Promise Winter School on information retrieval and information visualization is to give participants a grounding in the core topics that constitute the multidisciplinary area of multilingual and multimedia information retrieval. Other topics of the school will include usability of systems, system evaluation, social media and several other related fields.

Important Dates

Registration deadline: 30 September 2011
Notification: Mid October 2011
Winter School: 23 - 27 January 2012

Data infrastructurEs for Supporting Information Retrieval Evaluation (DESIRE 2011) Workshop Co-located with CIKM 2011

2011-05-18T06:32:40Z

The DESIRE 2011 workshop is held in conjunction with the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2011).

The main objective of the workshop is to gather together experts from the areas of information retrieval, databases, and knowledge management, to encourage them to recognise the urgency of addressing the problem of developing infrastructures for managing the scientific data coming from IR experimental evaluation in an integrated and coherent way, and to coordinate efforts towards drawing a roadmap and suggesting best practices for an effective solution of the problem.

Important Dates

Individual Workshop Papers Due: June 20, 2011
Notification of Acceptance: July 8, 2011
Camera Ready: July 20, 2011
Workshop: 28th October 2011, Glasgow, UK

Second International Workshop on Visual Analytics (EuroVA 2011)

2011-05-18T06:32:15Z

EuroVA 2011 (EuroVAST in 2010) is the second international workshop on visual analytics held in Europe and aims at continuing the success of the first edition, held in Bordeaux, France, on June 8th, 2010, co-located with EuroVis 2010.

Also this year the goal of the workshop is to promote and advance the combination and integration of visualization and analytics methods for the purpose of problem solving in a variety of application domains including engineering, business, public policy, medicine, security, etc.

EuroVA will be held on May 31st, 2011, in Bergen, Norway, as an EuroVis 2011 Workshop.

First Workshop on Personalised Multilingual Hypertext Retrieval (PMHR 2011)

2011-03-25T07:32:03Z

The PMHR 2011 workshop is held in conjunction with the ACM Hypertext 2011 (HT2011) Conference.

The aims of this workshop are twofold:

to set the scene in this challenging area, allowing the different communities engaged in related research topics to meet and to determine a program of actions to undertake
to set up a strategy to follow for the evaluation of PMHR systems, so to define the collection of hypertext documents to use to evaluate such type of systems together with the metrics to use.

Important Dates

Deadline for submission: 4th April 2011
Notification of acceptance: 30th April 2011
Early registration deadline: 8th May 2011
Revised version of papers: 9th May 2011
Workshop: 6th June 2011