The fourth HCIR workshop was held this past weekend at Rutgers University in conjunction with the IIiX 2010 conference. This was, in my opinion, the best workshop of the four so far. Part of the strength of the workshop has been the range of presentations, covering more mature work in traditional 30 minute presentations, a poster and demo session, and, new this year, reports from the HCIR search challenge.

From the web site:

The aims of the challenge are to encourage researchers and practitioners to build and demonstrate information access systems satisfying at least one of the following:

• Not only deliver relevant documents, but provide facilities for making meaning with those documents.
• Increase user responsibility as well as control; that is, the systems require and reward human effort.
• Offer the flexibility to adapt to user knowledge / sophistication / information need.
• Are engaging and fun to use.

Participants would be given access to the New York Times annotated corpus which consists of 1.8 million articles published in the Times between 1987 and 2007, and they would be expected do something interesting in searching or browsing this collection.

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If you are doing research in interactive information retrieval, information seeking, collaborative search, and the like (that is, you’re concerned with what users do when they look for information), you might consider submitting  paper to IIiX 2010.

IIiX will explore the relationships between the contexts that affect information retrieval and information seeking, how these contexts impact information behavior, and how knowledge of information contexts and information behaviors can help design truly interactive information systems.

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