Selected SIGIR 2009 Workshops

Among the (all) interesting workshops that the 32nd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference (the best event about research on Information Retrieval), I would like to select some that are of my very taste:

• Information Retrieval and Advertising: While computational advertising is still a relatively young research field, its significance is enormous as it provides the primary business model behind most of today's Web experience. Online advertising systems employ many IR techniques alongside approaches developed in statistical modeling and machine learning, large-scale data processing, optimization, microeconomics, and human-computer interaction. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together researchers from the different areas relevant to online advertising, strengthen collaborations between industry and academia, and provide a forum for discussion and presentation of late-breaking research. Date for papers: May 19, 2009
• Search in Social Media: Social applications are the fastest growing segment of the web. While there has been progress on searching particular kinds of social media, such as blogs, search in others (facebook/myspace/flickr) are not as well understood. The purpose of this workshop is to focus the attention of the research community on this emerging topic, and to bring together information retrieval and social media researchers to consider the following questions: How should we search in social media? What are the needs of users, and models of those needs, specific to social media search? What models make the most sense? How does search interact with existing uses of social media? What works and what doesn't? Date for papers: June 8, 2009
• Understanding the user - Logging and interpreting user interactions in information search and retrieval: Modern information search systems can benefit greatly from using additional information about the user and the user's behavior. Feedback data based on direct interaction (e.g., clicks, scrolling, etc.) as well as on general user profiles/preferences has been proven valuable for personalizing the retrieval process. New technology has made it inexpensive and easy to collect more feedback data and more different types of data (e.g., gaze, emotional, or biometric data). The workshop focuses on discussing and identifying most promising research directions with respect to logging, interpreting, integrating, and using feedback data. Ultimately, it will be aimed at arranging a commonly shared collection of user interaction logging tools for various purposes and based on a variety of feedback data sources. The workshop brings together researchers from IR as well as from human-computer interaction. Date for papers: May 18, 2009

I see the first and the last as very complementary. The second one is a must, specially with the great Marti Hearst in the chairs.