Just in case you missed it, here are the details of this month’s Informer, which came out last week. As usual, lots of good stuff, with great mix of feature articles, research pieces and group overviews. For further details see the Informer website. Or if you fancy becoming a contributor, get in touch!
Informer: Spring 2013 Issue Out Now!
Editorial
By Udo Kruschwitz
Welcome back! This spring 2013 edition of Informer will bring you a range of fairly different articles, perhaps just the right mix for this time of the year. More about the articles later, let us first have a glimpse at what has been going on in the IR community. [...]
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Information Wayfinding, Part 1: A Not-So-New Metaphor
By Tyler Tate
Browsing the Web. Surfing the Net. Navigating a Web site. Traversing a hierarchy. Going back. Scrolling up and down. Returning home. We’ve seen such metaphors throughout our history of using computers to interact with information. Haphazard though they may seem be, these metaphors highlight a universal reality of human psychology: we perceive the world – both physical and digital – in spatial terms. As George A. Miller [1] observed in 1968 [...]
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Interaction Models for Faceted Search
By Tony Russell-Rose
Faceted search offers tremendous potential for transforming the search experience. It provides a flexible framework by which users can satisfy a wide variety of information needs, ranging from simple fact retrieval to complex exploratory search and discovery scenarios. But there is one design aspect of faceted search that is particularly hard to get right: the interactive behaviour of the facets themselves, i.e. how they should respond and update when selected. Surprisingly, the design choices at this level of detail can make a remarkable difference to the overall user experience: the wrong ones can make an application feel disjointed and obstructive, and increase the likelihood of returning zero results. In this post, we’ll examine the key design options and provide some recommendations [...]
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Call for Book Reviews (Spring 2013)
By Cathal Gurrin
This issue we include another Call for Reviews in which we seek reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to the IR community. Books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are interested in reviewing one of these books, please let Cathal know (cgurrin@computing.dcu.ie) which book you are interested in reviewing and we will arrange for a copy (paper or online format) to be sent to you along with review guidelines. For examples of previous book reviews, see the most recent issues of Informer. The currently available books (courtesy of our good friends at Springer) are [...]
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Search: Emergent and Extrinsic Semantics
By John Tait
Semantics is a term often used in the search technology and information retrieval community these days. A distinction is drawn between semantic and traditional search, implying that somehow semantic search is a more advanced or sophisticated form [...]
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Hybrid Parallel Classifiers for Managing Big Data with Hierarchies
By Nandita Tripathi
“Big Data” is one of the latest buzzwords in the IT industry nowadays. Companies are building up huge stores of data running into terabytes and more. Data hierarchies are getting bigger and bigger and more complex. At the same time, search/categorization speeds are also expected to increase. Single classifiers are now unable to deal with this huge data in real time [...]
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Information Retrieval Group, University of Duisburg-Essen
By Norbert Fuhr
The Information Retrieval group at the University of Duisburg-Essen is part of the Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science Department in the Faculty of Engineering Sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen. The department provides degree programmes in Applied Computer Science as well as in Applied Cognitive and Media Science, both at the bachelor and master level. Besides 11 computer science professors, there are also four professors of psychology, who are mainly teaching in the second program. This unique composition also leads to a user-oriented focus in the computer science programme [...]
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Events Spring 2013
By Andy Macfarlane
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Applied research at the Competence Center Information Retrieval and Machine Learning of DAI Laboratory, TU Berlin
By Frank Hopfgartner
The Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) Laboratory at Technische Universita¨t Berlin, headed by Prof. Dr. Sahin Albayrak, works on providing solutions for a new generation of systems and services to support our everyday life, coined as “smart services and smart systems”. The institute currently employs over 100 researchers, post-docs, graduate students, and support staff. The main objective of the lab is to provide a bridge between Academia and Industry, which has led to strong ties with leading multinational companies, research institutes and various SMEs (Berlin is home to a large share of Europe’s ICT start-ups) [...]
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Made in Germany – Information Retrieval Research in Regensburg
By David Elsweiler
These are heady times for the German IR community. Norbert Fuhr’s recent winning of the Salton Prize not only rewarded a fantastic and long-term individual contribution to the field, but has also served to shed light on the whole IR scene in Germany – a fact underlined by this “Made in Germany” series [...]
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::: Opportunities for Authors :::
If you are an expert in information retrieval or any aspect of search who has strong writing skills, we invite you to contribute to Informer. Please send an article proposal to us at: irsg@bcs.org.
For more information about the BCS IRSG, please go to:
::: http://irsg.bcs.org/about.php
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::: About Informer :::
Informer is the quarterly newsletter of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG). Its aim is to provide insights and inspiration to researchers and professionals working in all aspects of search and information retrieval. Our articles provide accessible and timely coverage of important topics, ranging from focused, practical advice, to concise overviews of broader topics, and to deeper, research-oriented articles and opinion pieces.
The IRSG is a Specialist Group of BCS. Its mission is to provide a focus for the European IR community, facilitate communication between researchers and practitioners and promote the adoption of IR research within industry. We host a major European conference (ECIR) and provide an associated programme of workshops, seminars and events. The IRSG is free to join via the BCS website, which provides access to further IR articles, events and resources.
BCS is the industry body for IT professionals. With members in over 100 countries around the world, BCS is the leading professional and learned society in the field of computers and information systems.
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::: Visit Informer at http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/
::: If you have comments, questions, or suggestions for Informer, please contact us at irsg@bcs.org.
