Misc

Another year has passed, and it’s now time for the usual annual highlights post. Here are some of the notable events and achievements from 2023:

• Completed the first draft of our book “User Simulation for Evaluating Information Access Systems” co-authored with ChengXiang Zhai, and published it on arXiv.
• Delivered a tutorial with ChengXiang Zhai on simulation-based evaluation at CIKM’23.
• Co-organized the second workshop on Measuring the Quality of Explanations in Recommender Systems, this time held at RecSys’23.
• Published several papers on conversational information access, including user simulation (WSDM’23), datasets (SIGIR’23a, SIGIR’23b, and CIKM’23), and reproducibility (ECIR’23).
• Contributed to research on recommender systems, focusing on the impact of explanations (CHI’23) and LLM-based recommendations (RecSys’23).
• Received the Best Resource Paper Award with Weronika Łajewska at CIKM’23.
• Welcomed a new faculty member, Petra Galuscakova, to the IAI group, marking another milestone in our growth.

Looking forward to what 2024 has in store!

A selection of highlights from 2022:

• We organized ECIR’22 in Stavanger, Norway, marking it as the first major IR conference with a hybrid setup that allowed in-person travel after the pandemic. We wrote about our experiences in SIGIR Forum.
• Co-organized a workshop on Measuring the Quality of Explanations in Recommender Systems (SIGIR’22).
• Pioneered work on natural language user profiles for transparent and scrutable recommendation, published as a perspectives paper at SIGIR’22.
• Trond Linjordet successfully completed and defended his PhD thesis “A Critical Look at the Evaluation of Knowledge Graph Question Answering“.
• Two new PhD students started at IAI under my supervision: Nolwenn Bernard and Weronika Łajewska.
• Above all, I became a father this year, a personal milestone that far outshines any professional success. It has made me even more deliberate about where I spend my time, prompting me to say no more often, including accepting committee invitations and traveling to conferences.

A selection of highlights from 2021:

• Served as PC co-chair of the short paper track of CIKM’21.
• Organized workshops on Simulation for IR Evaluation (@SIGIR’21) and Personal Knowledge Graphs (@AKBC’21).
• Received a Best Paper Award at DESIRES’21.
• Ivica Kostric joined IAI as a PhD student.
• Joined Google as a Staff Research Scientist in a 50% role. In the remaining 70% I continue to work as a Professor at the University of Stavanger. (Yes, that adds up to 120% ;))

A compilation of highlights from 2020:

• Organized ICTIR’20 together with Vinay Setty and Trond Linjordet — due to COVID, as a virtual conference.
• The Norwegian Research Center for AI Innovation (NorwAI) started its operations, where I lead the work package on Language Technology for AI. There will be 3 PhD positions at UiS.
• Published papers that attracted attention, on user simulation (KDD’20), novel entity discovery (WWW’20), entity linking (SIGIR’20), and explanations (SIGIR’20).
• Our submission, led by Vinay Setty, achieved top performance at the SMART Challenge.