When I organized the SIGIR 2009 Industry Track last year, my goal was to meet the standard set by the CIKM 2008 Industry Event: a compelling set of presentations that would give researchers an opportunity to learn about the problems most relevant to industry practitioners, and offer practitioners an opportunity to deepen their understanding of the field in which they are working. I was mostly happy with the results last year, and the popularity of the industry track relative to the parallel technical sessions suggest that my assessment is not simply from personal bias.
But this year the SIGIR 2010 Industry Track broke new ground. The keynotes were from some of the most senior technologists at the world’s largest web search engines:
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SIGIR 2010: Day 3 Industry Track Keynotes
SIGIR 2010: Day 2 Technical Sessions
On the second day of the SIGIR 2010 conference, I did start shuttling between sessions to attend particular talks.
SIGIR 2010: Day 2 Keynote
The second day of the SIGIR 2010 conference kicked off with a keynote by TREC pioneer Donna Harman entitled “Is the Cranfield Paradigm Outdated?”. If you are at all familiar with Donna’s work on TREC, you’ll hardly be surprised that her answer was a resounding “NO!”.
But of course she did a lot more than defend Cranfield. She offered a comprehensive and fascinating history of the Cranfield paradigm, starting with the Cranfield 1 experiments in the late 1950s which evaluated manual indexing systems.
SIGIR 2010: Day 1 Posters
The first day of SIGIR 2010 ended with a monster poster session–over 100 posters to see in 2 hours in a hall without air conditioning! I managed to see a handful:
SIGIR 2010: Day 1 Technical Sessions
I’ve always felt that parallel conference sessions are designed to optimize for anticipated regret, and SIGIR 2010 is no exception. I decided that I’d try to attend whole sessions rather than shuttle between them. I started by attending the descriptively titled “Applications I” session.
Jinyoung Kim of UMass presented joint work with Bruce Croft on “Ranking using Multiple Document Types in Desktop Search” in which they showed that type prediction can significantly improve known-item search performance in simulated desktop settings. I like the approach and result, but I’d be very interested to see how well it applied to more recall-oriented tasks.
SIGIR 2010: Day 1 Keynote
As promised, here are some highlights of the SIGIR 2010 conference thus far. Also check out the tweet stream with hash tag #sigir2010.
I arrived here on Monday, too jet-lagged to even imagine attending the tutorials, but fortunately I recovered enough to go to the welcome reception in the Parc de Bastions that evening. Then a night of sleep and on to the main event.
Off to Geneva for SIGIR
I’m flying to Geneva tonight to attend SIGIR. Hope to see some of you there! I’ll be back in a week and will post highlights and personal reactions.
Recruiting and a Lesson in Attention Scarcity
Several people have asked me recently for advice on how to recruit for their tech startups. I’ve responded by digging out the following email that someone emailed me last year. I reproduce it in full here, minus the company name:
Subject: we just got Beatles Rock Band for the office and are looking for a vocalist !!
Good Afternoon,
I hope you don’t mind me reaching out to you, but came across your LinkedIn page and my interest is peaked, to say the least. I hope after reading this you feel the same.
