Djoerd Hiemstra’s home page

Photos taken by Wessel Kraaij and Suzan Verberne during DIR 2010 in Nijmegen are now on-line

The 3rd SIKS/Twente Seminar on Searching and Ranking takes place on January 29, 2010 at the University of Twente. The goal of the one day workshop is to bring together researchers from companies and academia working on the effectiveness of search engines. The workshop will take place at the University of Twente at the Spiegel (building 2), lecture hall SP-6. Speakers are:

• Leif Azzopardi (University of Glasgow, UK)
• Arjen de Vries (CWI and University of Delft)
• Vanessa Murdock (Yahoo Research, Barcelona, Spain)

After the seminar, Claudia Hauff will defend her PhD Thesis: Predicting the Effectiveness of Queries and Retrieval Systems. The seminar is sponsored by SIKS (the Netherlands research School for Information and Knowledge Systems) and the CTIT (Centre for Telematics and Information Technology). For more information, check out the SSR 2010 website.

SIGIR 2010 will begin with a full day of tutorials on July 19, 2010.

Proposals are solicited for tutorials of either a half-day (3 hours plus breaks) or full day (6 hours plus breaks) on all topics of information retrieval and its applications. Each tutorial should cover a single topic in detail. For example, tutorials may cover an information retrieval topic in depth, introduce an emerging application for retrieval technologies, or update the information retrieval community on recent advances in related fields.

Submissions should include a cover sheet and an extended abstract. The cover sheet should specify: (1) the title and length of the tutorial; (2) the intended audience (introductory, intermediate, advanced) and prerequisite knowledge or skills required, if any; (3) complete contact information for the contact person and other presenters; and (4) a brief biography (max. 2 paragraphs) for each presenter. The extended abstract should be 3 to 4 pages, and should include an outline of the tutorial, along with descriptions of the course objectives, its relevance to the information retrieval community, and course materials.

Tutorial proposals in PDF format must be sent via email by February 12, 2010 to tutorials@sigir2010.org. The submissions will undergo peer review and tutorials to be presented will be selected by the SIGIR Program Committee. Notifications will be send out by 24 March, 2010.

More information at SIGIR 2010.

The Dutch Belgian Database Day (DBDBD) is a yearly one-day workshop organized in a Belgian or Dutch university, whose general topic is database research. DBDBD invites submissions (1 page abstract) on a broad range of database and database-related topics, including but not limited to data storage and management, theoretical database issues, database performance, data mining, information retrieval, data semantics, querying, ontologies etc. Based on the submissions, the workshop will be organized in different sessions each covering a particular topic.

At the DBDBD, junior researchers from the Netherlands and Belgium can present their recent results. It is an excellent opportunity to meet up with your Belgian/Dutch colleagues, and to get informed about the (recent) database-related research performed in Belgian/Dutch universities. The workshop is also open to non-Belgian/Dutch participants (presentations are in English).

The DBDBD 2009 is organized under auspices of SIKS, the Dutch research school for information and knowledge systems. This year, DBDBD will be held in the Aula Congrescentre of the TUDelft, located on the university campus, on Monday November 30th 2009. Participation is free for all SIKS-members (Phd-students, research fellows, senior research fellows and associated members).

Visit the DBDBD 2009 home page.

The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval (DIR 2010) will take place at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, on January 25-26, 2010. The primary aim of the DIR is to provide an international meeting place where researchers from the domain of information retrieval and related disciplines can exchange information and present innovative research developments.

Important dates
Paper submission deadline: November 13, 2009
Notification of acceptance: December 11, 2009
Conference at Radboud University Nijmegen: January 25-26, 2010

Call for papers at DIR 2010.

I will give several lectures on information retrieval modeling at the Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval, which will be held September 11-16, 2009 in Petrozavodsk, Russia. The main audience of the school is graduate and post-graduate students, young scientists and professionals who have experience in development of information retrieval applications. The school will host approximately 100 participants.

Information Retrieval Modeling
There is no such thing as a dominating model or theory of information retrieval, unlike the situation in for instance the area of databases where the relational model is the dominating database model. In information retrieval, some models work for some applications, whereas others work for other applications. For instance, vector space models are well-suited for similarity search and relevance feedback in many (also non-textual) situations if a good weighting function is available; the probabilistic retrieval model or naive Bayes model might be a good choice if examples of relevant and nonrelevant documents are available; Google’s PageRank model is often used in situations that need modelling of more of less static relations between documents; region models have been designed to search in structured text; and language models are helpful in situations that require models of language similarity or document priors; In this tutorial, I carefully describe all these models by explaining the consequences of modelling assumptions. I address approaches based on statistical language models in great depth. After the course, students are able to choose a model of information retrieval that is adequate in new situations, and to apply the model in practice.

More information at RuSSIR 2009.

On June 24, 2009 at the University of Twente

http://www.cs.utwente.nl/~hiemstra/ssr2009/

The goal of the one day seminar is to bring together researchers from companies and academia working on enterprise search problems. Speakers at the seminar are: David Hawking from Funnelback Internet and Enterprise Search & the Australian National University, who will talk about Practical Methods for Evaluating Enterprise Search. Iadh Ounis from the University of Glasgow will present Voting Techniques for Expert Search. Maarten de Rijke from the University of Amsterdam will talk about Expert Profiling Out In the Wild.

Excellent photos by Sander Bockting

Welcome to the 9th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR). I very well remember the DIR workshop in 2001 that was also organized in Twente. It took place exactly one day before my PhD defense, to give us the opportunity to have one of the PhD committee members, Stephen Robertson, as the keynote speaker. I am proud to see that DIR does not need PhD defenses any more to attract excellent keynotes. This year, DIR presents Rene van Erk, Director of Product- and Business Development Europe at Wolters Kluwer as the industry keynote; we present professor Gerhard Weikum, Scientific Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, as the academic keynote. We also present comedian Daniel van Veen as the “cultural keynote” to let our participants taste a bit of our university’s unique campus activities.

We have tried this year to especially encourage PhD students and researchers from industry to submit their research. Each submission was reviewed by at least two and often three or four program committee members. We thank the program committee members for their high quality reviews. Of 15 submissions to DIR, 12 were accepted. Another 5 submissions were accepted as poster presentations. Four papers were written with participation from industry and most other papers have a PhD student as the first author.

Special thanks to the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) for sponsoring the participation of Dutch SIKS members, to the Werkgemeenschap Informatiewetenschap (WGI) for providing a solid financial basis for organizing DIR now and in the future, to the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO) for sponsoring the travel and hotel costs of our international keynote speaker Gerhard Weikum, to the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT) for sponsoring the proceedings, to the University of Twente and to Cultural Center the Vrijhof for sponsoring our cultural activity on Monday.

To an inspiring DIR 2009!

Rene van Erk is member of the European management team of Wolters Kluwer where he is responsible for all Product - and Business Development. In this role, his key responsibility is to optimize the WK portfolio for maximum growth, meaning: a) M&A focus: Responsible for identifying acquisition opportunities with a good strategic portfolio b) Leading Innovation: Overall responsible for Product Development & Product Management moving WK from content provider to information solutions provider c) Leading our Online and Software Businesses: Wolters Kluwer currently owns around 30 Software Development Companies and leading Online properties across Europe. Rene will talk about: Communities and Workflow: Driving Information Consumption

More info at: DIR 2009