Search Solutions is the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group’s annual event focused on practitioner issues in the arena of search and information retrieval. The tutorials take place on Tuesday 28th November 2017 one day before Search Solutions. 

The tutorials offer conference attendees and local participants a stimulating and informative selection of practical training courses reflecting current topics and state-of-the-art methods in search and information retrieval. These tutorials will be presented by subject matter experts and will reflect the high academic and professional standards of the Search Solutions conference series.

We offer scholarships or fee waivers for unemployed BCS members looking to advance their careers: please contact the tutorial chair ([log in to unmask]) if you are eligible and interested. 

Provisional Programme

Morning Session 09:30 - 13:00

Tutorial 1 - Designing Search.  Instructor: Tony Russell-Rose, UXLabs Ltd (Wilkes Room 3)

Search is not just a box and ten blue links. Search is a journey: an exploration where what we encounter along the way changes what we seek. But in order to guide people along this journey, we must understand both the art and science of user experience design. The aim of this tutorial is to deliver a learning experience grounded in good scholarship, integrating the latest research findings with insights derived from the practical experience of designing and optimizing dozens of commercial search applications. It focuses on the development of transferable, practical skills that can be learnt and practiced within a half-day session.

Afternoon Session 14:00 - 17:30

Tutorial 2 - Text Analysis with GATE. Instructor: Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield. (Wilkes Room 3).

This tutorial takes a detailed view of key text mining tasks (introduction to NLP, linguistic pre-processing, entity and relation recognition, semantic annotation, indexing and multi-paradigm search) of textual content. It will cover both the latest state-of-the-art research and selected established methods and tools. It will show how text analysis tools and techniques can be used to assist with semantic search by providing extra information that is not explicit within the text itself. Finally, some real-world applications of the technology will be demonstrated, showcasing the entire pipeline of data collection, annotation, indexing, search and visualization.

Tutorial 3 - Searching the Linked Open Data Cloud. Instructor:  Epaminondas Kapetanios, University of Westminster. (Wilkes Room 4).

Linked Open Data (LOD) has been around for 10 years and although the LOD cloud has been growing steadily, its adoption has been slower than expected. Some of the main problems that limit its take-up in practice are in fact exploration and interpretation of any available data as well as current methods of querying for linked-data which are too limited, especially when it comes to the ability of providing high-quality search results. More specific, the main challenge for LOD is at the heart of its invention and main incentive to create the Web of Data as a transparent mechanism for using the Web as knowledge medium: re-usability of data. In this tutorial, we will showcase the practicability and limitations of the LOD project as one of the forerunner platforms for data science and big data analytics

Registration
Registration link: https://events.bcs.org/book/2718/
Registration fees (including VAT at 20%) are as follows (per tutorial):

Early Bird Rates (until 23:59 on 31-Oct-2017)
BCS member rate: £90
ISKO members rate: £90
Non-member rate: £110

Normal Rates (from 01-Nov-2017 until 23:59 on 26-Nov-2017)
BCS member rate: £110
ISKO members rate: 110
Non-member rate: £130

Closing Date for bookings is 23:59 on Sunday 26th November 2017.  No more bookings will be taken after this date.

Cancellations & Refunds
A full refund will be issued if a cancellation is received within 14 days of the booking date or by 12:00 pm on Tuesday 21st November 2017, otherwise, name substitutions will be allowed if notified before the closing date.

For overseas delegates who wish to attend the event please note that BCS does not issue invitation letters.

Panel:
Dr A. MacFarlane, City University London (Chair)
Dr M. Oakes, University of Wolverhampton
Dr. H. Liu, University of Bedfordshire