SIGIR 2018: Who, What, Where, When, and What Happened?
This year’s ACM SIGIR (Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference took place July 8-12 in Ann Arbor on the beautiful campus of the University of Michigan.
The 41stannual conference featured a rich assortment of tutorials, a doctoral consortium, conference keynotes, technical tracks and workshops, many papers, and mealtime special events.
Some of our favorite InfoSeekers attended and had responsibilities. Souvick Ghosh was the new SIGIR Student Liaison for the Americas region. He and Soumik Mandal were also student volunteers. As Student Liaison, Vic’s goal was to welcome the students “in the corners” into the community so that no one is left behind. As Student Affairs Chair Laura Dietz put it, they are to encourage students to “Come, talk to us!”, which is also their motto.
Soumik was responsible for maintaining the smooth operation of a few sessions including “Women in IR,” a session that focused on challenges faced by women in information retrieval, computer science and related research communities.
Matt Mitsui and Jiqun Liu presented a short paper, “How Much is Too Much? Whole Session vs. First Query Behaviors in Task Type Prediction.” And, Chirag Shah’s book on Social Information Seeking: Leveraging the Wisdom of the Crowd (2017) was on display at the Springer table.
“The conference is a wonderful opportunity to meet researchers whom we cite and read about, and the industry partners. The social events and coffee sessions were perfect to meet our academic inspirations and role models,” Vic said.
Next year: Paris! And, drumroll please, Chirag will be a general co-chair for the SIGIR 2021 conference.
