Highlights from 2021

A selection of highlights from 2021:

PhD opening – Language Modeling for Explainable AI

We have a PhD position in language modeling for explainable AI, funded by SFI NorwAI, the new 8-year research-based innovation Center for AI Innovation.

We are looking for applicants with a strong academic background who have completed a five-year master degree (3+2) within Computer Science, more specifically within information retrieval or natural language processing, preferably acquired recently; or possess corresponding qualifications that could provide a basis for successfully completing a doctorate.

Details and application at Jobbnorge. Deadline: October 17, 2021.

Best paper award at DESIRES’21

I was honoured to receive a Best Paper Award for my paper “Conversational AI from an Information Retrieval Perspective: Remaining Challenges and a Case for User Simulation” at the 2nd International Conference on Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems (DESIRES’21), which took place last week. The paper as well as the presentation slides are available online.

Workshop on Personal Knowledge Graphs

I’m co-organizing a workshop on Personal Knowledge Graphs at the Automatic Knowledge Base Construction Conference (AKBC’21).

The concept of personal knowledge graphs has been around for a while, in recognition of the need to represent structured information about entities that are personally related to a user. However, several open questions remain regarding its definition, construction, population, utilization, and practical realization. The workshop aims to bring different communities together to discuss these issues and create a shared research agenda.

We solicit both regular papers, position paper, demonstrators, as well as encore talks, i.e., presentation of work that has already been published in a leading conference or journal. Submission deadline: Sep 6, 2021.

For more details, visit the workshop’s website at https://pkgs.ws/.

SIGIR’21 preprints and resources

Thanks to a fruitful collaboration with colleagues at Google, Bloomberg, Radboud University, Shandong University, and the University of Amsterdam, and, of course, students at the University of Stavanger, I have the following papers to appear at SIGIR this year. All are around conversational and/or recommender systems and come with publicly released resources.