Together with ChengXiang Zhai, we will be giving our user simulation tutorial at AAAI’24 and WWW’24, customized to the respective audiences. The AAAI’24 edition adopts a broader perspective of user simulation for evaluating an interactive AI system and focuses more on simulation algorithms and techniques that are well connected with various sub-fields of AI, such as machine learning and agent-based systems. In contrast, the WWW’24 edition emphasizes more on applications of user simulation for evaluating Web information access systems, including click modeling and the application of simulation techniques in e-commerce.
Tutorials
Tutorial on User Simulation @CIKM’23
I’m excited to share that, together with the esteemed ChengXiang Zhai, we’ll be presenting a tutorial on “User Simulation for Evaluating Information Access Systems” at the upcoming 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM ’23) in Birmingham, UK, in October. This half-day tutorial is based on our upcoming FnTIR book. We look forward to sharing our insights and also hope for feedback that could shape the final version of the book. Visit our companion website usersim.ai for more info.
Entity Linking and Retrieval tutorial at WWW’13
Earlier this week, Edgar Meij, Daan Odijk, and I gave a half-day tutorial at the WWW’13 conference on Entity Linking and Retrieval.
The tutorial consists of three parts: (i) entity linking (Edgar), (ii) entity retrieval (me), and a hands-on lab session (Daan). The hands-on session is further subdivided into entity linking and entity retrieval parts. The slides are made available on github. We also created a Mendeley group with all the papers that were discussed. The tags, entity linking and entity retrieval, hint the part of the tutorial to which each paper belongs. We intend to maintain and expand this repository, so it might be useful for you to follow this group.
Given that this was a half-day tutorial, we had to be quite selective in what we presented. A full-day version of the same tutorial will be given by us at SIGIR’13 in July. If you have suggestions for improvements and pointers to papers, approaches, services, etc. that we could/should cover (yes, this includes your own work) then don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!
PROMISE Winter School 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 is a week-long event consisting of guest lectures from invited speakers who are recognized experts in the field of information retrieval and databases.
The school mainly targets PhD and Master students but all other researchers or participation from industry is welcome.
Registration deadline: 20 December 2012
Winter School: 4-8 February 2013
For details, see http://www.promise-noe.eu/events/winter-school-2013/.