SIGIR2004 · Mobility and training for early stage researchers at ACM SIGIR 2004

Final Activity Report Summary - SIGIR2004 (Mobility and training for early stage researchers at ACM SIGIR 2004)

The Annual International ACM SIGIR 'Conference on research and development in information retrieval' (SIGIR) is the leading academic conference on research in IR. A Marie Curie LCF grant was awarded to SIGIR 2004 allowing early stage researchers to attend the conference, and therefore benefit from the extensive training and contact building potential available at this premier event. The conference was held at the University of Sheffield in the UK, organised and managed by the IR group at the department of information studies at Sheffield University. The Marie Curie grant was used to support the travel, registration and subsistence of 32 early stage researchers. This in part contributed to the conference being one of the largest SIGIRs ever (the largest European-based SIGIR). Over 450 attended the conference and workshops (far exceeding expectations; where around 300 delegates were anticipated). A total of 34 nationalities were present; half the attendees were European-based, delegates from five candidate countries were present. In addition to support from Marie Curie, 13 organisations -including some of the major search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask Jeeves, etc.)-provided sponsorship totalling USD29K. Profits from the conference were substantial. A large fraction of the profit will go to funding early stage researcher travel to future SIGIRs; the rest of the money will be contributed to the running of the ACM and BCS academic computer societies. The conference ran the full programme of events that were planned: -A newcomer's breakfast was attended by over 100 new researchers and SIGIR members, so as to welcome those starting out in Information Retrieval research and to provide the opportunities for contacts to be made. - ACM Fellow and senior Microsoft researcher, Gordon Bell, opened the conference with a talk on the pioneering work he has conducted in personal memories with his MyLifeBits project. - A total of 58 papers and 65 posters from international IR research groups were presented. - Leading IR researchers conducted 8 half-day tutorials, which were well attended. - In addition, 11 post-conference workshops were held, a record number for SIGIR. The most popular was the Information Retrieval in Context workshop, which had over 50 attendees. - Thanks largely to the support of Marie Curie, SIGIR ran for the first time, a Doctoral Consortium where nine PhD students presented their work to a panel of the world's leading information retrieval researchers. The format of the day was: short presentations of thesis work with discussion in plenary sessions; detailed discussion between each student and 2 members of the panel; and social interaction over lunch and dinner. In the post-event feedback, the student participants said how useful it was to have the undivided attention of 2 experts in the 1-on-2 sessions. Of the 32 early stage researchers who received LCF funding, 16 presented papers, 6 attended the doctoral consortium, 6 presented posters and a further 4 simply attended the conference. Of the recipients, 12(38%) were female. A press release for the conference was put out and picked up by a few online organisations. The proceedings of the conference were published by ACM Press and are also available online via the ACM Portal (portal.acm.org). Reports on each of the workshops and the Doctoral Consortium were published in the December issue of the ACM SIGIR newsletter, SIGIR Forum (sigir.org/forum/).

Data: CORDIS, © European Union