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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

The 9th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR) will take place at the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands, on February 2-3, 2009. The workshop is organised under the auspices of the Working Community on Information Sciences (WGI) and the School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS). The workshop is sponsored by NWO, CTIT and the University of Twente.

Keynote Speaker: prof. Gerhard Weikum (MPII, Saarbruecken, Germany) Gerhard Weikum is Research Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) in Saarbruecken, Germany, where he is leading the department on databases and information systems. Prof. Weikum is ACM fellow and a renowned expert in the field of Databases. He received the VLDB 10-Year Achievement Award in 2002. Since then, he focused on several information retrieval problems such as peer-to-peer search, search efficiency, and database and search integration, resulting in for instance 6 full papers at the last SIGIR conferences.

Due to the cooperation between SIKS, SIKS-members can participate without paying entrance fee. Especially PhD-students working on the SIKS-focus “Web based Information Systems” and “Data management, Storage and Retrieval” are strongly encouraged to participate. There is a limited number of registrations for SIKS members. Registrations will be honored in a first come-first serve manner.

Participants of DIR are invited to the Annual Meeting of the Werkgemeenschap Informatieschap which is directly following DIR on Tuesday.

Prof. Gerhard Weikum (MPII, Saarbruecken, Germany) has agreed to give a keynote speech at the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop which takes place on 2 and 3 February 2009 at the University of Twente.

Gerhard Weikum is Research Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) in Saarbruecken, Germany, where he is leading the department on databases and information systems. Prof. Weikum is ACM fellow and a renowned expert in the field of Databases. He received the VLDB 10-Year Achievement Award in 2002. Since then, he focused on several information retrieval problems such as peer-to-peer search, search efficiency, and database and search integration, resulting in for instance 6 full papers at the last SIGIR conferences.

Paper submission deadline: 14 November 2008

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 2008 is organized under auspices of SIKS, the Dutch research school for information and knowledge systems and the Belgian Graduate School in Computing Science (GRASCOMP). This year, DBDBD will be held at the Arsenal, located at the heart of the charming city of Namur (Belgium), on Friday October 10th, 2008.

DBDB 2008 home page

We organize the 9th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR) in Twente. The event will take place on February 2-3, 2009 in our lovely “Vrijhof” building. The primary aim of Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval (DIR) workshop 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. The first call for papers is just out. Papers may range from theoretical work to system descriptions. We encourage Ph.D. students to submit their research. We also welcome contributions from industry when they focus on novel research directions. Have a look at the DIR website at: http://dir2009.cs.utwente.nl

Nelly Litvak and I organize a small but really interesting seminar before the PhD defense of Henning Rode on 27 June 2008: The first SIKS/Yahoo Seminar on Searching and Ranking in Structured Text Repositories. The goal of the one day seminar is to bring together researchers from companies and academia working in the area of computer science and applied mathematics on ranking and searching in highly dynamic, structured text environments. Keynote speakers are:

• Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain)
• Debora Donato (Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain)

The seminar is sponsored by: WGI, CTIT, NWO, SIKS, and Yahoo. Please send your name and affiliation to ssr (at) lists.utwente.nl if you plan to participate in the seminar.

The Twente Student Conference on IT is a conference organised twice a year. Students of the bachelor programmes Computer Science and Business Information Technology present the research carried out in the last phase of their programme.

TSConIT takes place on June 23rd (see http://referaat.cs.utwente.nl )

The participants of the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop in Maastricht smile for a team photo: With organiser Ed Hoenkamp left in the middle, and Netherlands most famous IR researcher Keith van Rijsbergen right in the back.

[More info]