Future research directions in IR

Wondering what your next IR conference paper should be about? This is the billion dollar question (well, at least for IR researchers) that I surely won’t answer for you. But, here is some hint.
(I’ve just come across this on Facebook (thnx to Arjen P. De Vries and Claudia Hauff); this is evidence, that if you cut through all the clutter, FB can indeed be a great tool sometimes for finding serendipitous information. Maybe this is also something to think about…)
The list contains nominated papers from prominent IR researchers “that, in their opinion, represent important new directions, research areas, or results in the IR field.”
I must say I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. And yes, it does make me feel good that I see our last year’s ECIR paper with Elena Smirnova on the list :)

Research positions in Trondheim, Norway

PhD positions at NTNU
As part of the Microsoft-led centre on Information Access Disruptions (iAD), NTNU is offering up to 4 PhD positions.
The NTNU-led subproject of iAD focuses on activities to create schema agnostic indexing services. There is strong convergence in approach and principles for information access across databases, XML repositories, text search and multimedia access. Still, different design targets are predicted to enable completely different technologies and use patterns for information access.
The research problems of the PhD positions should be within these target areas:

  1. Cloud as a platform for next generation information access (Supervisor: Prof. Svein Erik Bratsberg)
  2. Content based multimedia retrieval (Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Magnus Lie Hetland)
  3. Temporal and spatial information retrieval (Supervisor: Prof. Kjetil Nørvåg)

PhD grants at NTNU are normally 3 years, but may be extended by one additional year.
The PhD fellowships are placed in Norwegian salary code 1017, gross NOK 391.100 per year (equivalent to approx. EUR 51.000 and USD 65.000).
Application deadline: Feb 3, 2012.

Mobility fellowships for PhD students and young researchers
The Yggdrasil mobility programme offers grants to international PhD students and younger researchers (who received their PhD degree after 1 August 2006) for longer (between 3-12 months) research stays in Norway.
The fellowships (13500 NOK per month) essentially cover the cost of accommodation in Norway and the extra cost for food. (Note: Norway is *not* one of the cheapest places to live, so you’re assumed to have some additional income for covering “other aspects of life”.)
Application deadline: Feb 15, 2012.

New year’s resolution

Post more often.

Happy 2012!