Not having gone to SIGIR 2010, I missed Gary Flake’s keynote address, in which he described and demonstrated Microsoft Pivot, a zoomable, faceted search interface that his group built. Jeff Dalton has a good summary of the talk, which parallels Gary’s previous presentations, including a TED talk (video below). The demos are pretty slick, and the scale at which the system operates is impressive.

In some ways, his emphasis on rich clients and interactive control over large, pre-computed datasets, is a great illustration of HCIR principles. The user is encouraged to explore by making fluid, immediate, reversible operations over large data sets with the goal of finding useful information.

Continue Reading

I have been curious about the evolution of research interests in the IR community for a while, and have recently decided to do something quantitative about it. My plan is to track how different aspects of the field wax and wane throughout the conference series. To start off, I decided to compare SIGIR 2010 with SIGIR 2000. This is an arbitrary starting point, but I wanted to do something topical (relevant?) to start.

Continue Reading

Some ACM conferences such as CHI offer authors an opportunity to flag material misconceptions in reviewers’ perceptions of submitted papers prior to rendering a final accept/reject decision. SIGIR is not one of them. Its reviewers are free from any checks on their accuracy from the authors, and, to judge by the reviews of our submission, from the program committee as well.

Consider this: We wrote a paper on a novel IR framework which we believe has the potential to greatly increase the efficacy of interactive Information Retrieval systems. The topic we tackled is (not surprisingly) related to issues we often discuss on this and on the IRGupf blog, including HCIR, Interactive IR, Exploratory Search, and Collaborative Search.  In short, these are all areas that could be well served by an algorithmic framework that supports greater interactivity.

Continue Reading