One of the things we did slightly differently in this year’s HCIR Symposium was to introduce full-length, pier reviewed, top-tier conference-quality papers. We received a number of submissions, each of which was read and discussed by three reviewers. We then rejected some of papers, and sent several back for a rewrite-and-resubmit cycle. In the end, we accepted four papers, which have now been published in the ACM Digital Library.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover that of the 75 people attending HCIR 2012 last week, five were former FXPAL interns! In order of most recent internship, these were: Elena Agapie (Harvard), Abdi Diriye (then UCL, currently at CMU), Aditi Muralidharan (UC Berkeley), Chirag Shah (then UNC Chapel Hill, now Rutgers), and Jacek Gwizdka (then UofT, now UT). another former intern, Diane Kelly (then Rutgers, now UNC Chapel Hill) who was a reviewer, couldn’t make due to a scheduling conflict with a workshop in Japan.
I am hoping to see these alumni back next year, and encourage students interested in HCIR to consider an internship at FXPAL in 2013.
Last week we held the HCIR 2012 Symposium in Cambridge, Mass. This is the sixth in a series that we have organized. We expanded the format of this year’s meeting to a day and a half, and in addition to the posters, search challenge reports, and short talks, we introduced full papers reviewed to first-tier conference standards. I will write more about these later, and for details on other events at the Symposium, I refer you to the excellent blog post by one of the other co-orgranizers, Daniel Tunkelang.
In this post, I wanted to record my impressions of the keynote talk by Marti Hearst from UC Berkeley.
Opening slide from Marti Hearst's keynote address
We are happy to announce that the 2012 Human-Computer Information Retrieval Symposium (HCIR 2012) will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts October 4 – 5, 2012. The HCIR series of workshops has provided a venue for discussion of ongoing research on a range of topics related to interactive information retrieval, including interaction techniques, evaluation, models and algorithms for information retrieval, visual design, user modeling, etc. The focus of these meetings has been to bring together people from industry and academia for short presentations and in-depth discussion. Attendance has grown steadily since the first meeting, and as a result this year we have decided to modify the structure of the meeting to accommodate the increasing demand for participation.