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 :)
krisztianbalog
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:
- Cloud as a platform for next generation information access (Supervisor: Prof. Svein Erik Bratsberg)
- Content based multimedia retrieval (Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Magnus Lie Hetland)
- 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!
EOS workshop summary
The First International Workshop on Entity-Oriented Search (EOS) was held on July 28, 2011 in Beijing, China, in conjunction with SIGIR 2011. The objective for the workshop was to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners working on entity-oriented search to discuss tasks and challenges, and to uncover the next frontiers for academic research on the topic. The workshop program accommodated two invited talks, eleven refereed papers divided into three technical paper sessions, and a group discussion.
You can find the workshop proceedings here. A summary report, to appear in the December issue of SIGIR Forum, is already available online.
A Living Lab for Product Search
Earlier today I presented the work by Leif Azzopardi and myself at the CLEF 2011 conference, entitled Towards a Living Lab for Information Retrieval Research and Development. A proposal for a living lab for product search tasks. The abstract follows:
The notion of having a “living lab” to undertaken evaluations has been proposed by a number of proponents within the field of Information Retrieval (IR). However, what such a living lab might look like and how it might be setup has not been discussed in detail. Living labs have a number of appealing points such as realistic evaluation contexts where tasks are directly linked to user experience and the closer integration of research/academia and development/industry facilitating more efficient knowledge transfer. However, operationalizing a living lab opens up a number of concerns regarding security, privacy, etc. as well as challenges regarding the design, development and maintenance of the infrastructure required to support such evaluations. Here, we aim to further the discussion on living labs for IR evaluation and propose one possible architecture to create such an evaluation environment. To focus discussion, we put forward a proposal for a living lab on product search tasks within the context of an online shop.
Full paper | Presentation slides
We are keen to get feedback from the community to see if we should continue to develop this initiative further. If you’re at CLEF this week, come talk to me.