Searching for Information: Artificial Intelligence and
Information Retrieval Approaches

11-12 November 1999 at the IEE Scottish Engineering Centre, Glasgow


Introduction

The amount of information available is currently growing at an
incredible rate - the growth of the Internet being a prime example.  To fully
exploit this information, whether for business or leisure purposes, you
need techniques and tools that allow fast, effective and efficient access
in order to filter through the vast amounts of stored information.

The fields of information retrieval (IR) and, more recently, artificial
intelligence (AI) have been looking at this problem.  The IR field has
developed successful methods to deal effectively with huge amounts of
information, whereas the AI field has developed methods to learn the user's
information needs, extract information from text, and represent the semantics
of information.  All too often, however, both fields have suffered from
a lack of integration.  Quite simply, each community is often unaware of
each others work.

Aims

This event will, for the first time, attempt to bridge the gap between
the fields of AI and IR.  Over two days this Seminar will bring,
from academia and industry, some of the leading pioneers in both
fields, (see programme below), to provide a forum for sharing
and combining techniques, with the ultimate aim of improving the search process.

The event will include results of both theoretical and applied
experiments in using IR and AI techniques to seek information.  Participants will
benefit from learning about the latest developments across a broad
range of activities.

Who Should Attend?

The event will not only be of interest to academics and post-graduate
students working in the field but also those involved in industrial
and commercial research.  In addition - and just as importantly - the
event will be of direct relevance to people who are the end-users of
search systems.

Posters

To truly make this an interactive event, posters will be presented
describibg late-breaking results, work in progress, or work
that is best presented interactively or graphically.

Programme
Thursday, 11 November
10.00 Registration and coffee
10.45 Opening and introduction
11.00 The issues of representations in AI, IR and NLP
          Yorick Wilks (University of Sheffield, UK)
11.45 Applying AI to the web
          Dieter Fensel (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
12.30 Lunch and poster session
14.00 How smart are current image retrieval techniques?
          John P Eakins (University of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK)
14.45 A picture representing triumph or similar: classification based
          navigation and retrieval for picture archives
          Carole Goble (University of Manchester, UK)
15.30 Coffee
16.00 Intelligent information retrieval agents
          Theo Huibers (DOXiS, The Netherlands)
16.45 Personalised information objects
          Marc Moens (Language Technology Group, UK)
17.30 CLOSE

Friday, 12 November
9.15  Opening and introduction
9.30  IR lessons for AI
          Karen Sparck-Jones (University of Cambridge, UK)
10.15 Coffee
10.45 Reinforcement learning for information seeking
          Susan Craw (The Robert Gordon University, UK)
11.30 Learning by examples as relevance feedback, and relevance
          feedback as learning by examples
          Gianni Amati (University of Glasgow, UK)
12.15 Lunch and poster session
13.30 Quantum logic: a new paradigm for IR
          Keith van Rijsbergen (University of Glasgow, UK)
14.15 Probabilistic retrieval: thresholding for automatic filtering
          Stephen Robertson (Microsoft Research Ltd, UK)
15.00 Coffee
15.30 To be advised
          Yves Chiaramella (Laboratoire CLIPS- IMAG, France)
16.15 Discussion
17.30 CLOSE


Registration and Fees

Fees for attending this unique course include lunches and all refreshments
over the two days as well as a digest publication of all the papers  and posters
presented. The cost of attending is just £225 (plus VAT) for IEE/BCS Members
and £295 (plus VAT) for non-members.  In addition we offer special concessionary
rates for student, retired and unemployed IEE/BCS Members and non-members
at just £30 (plus VAT) and £115 (plus VAT) respectively:

 IEE/BCS Members                                                £264.38 (inc VAT)
 IEE/BCS Members - retired/unemployed/students £35.25 (inc VAT)
 Non-Members                                                        £346.63 (inc VAT)
 Non-Members - retired/unemployed/students        £135.13 (inc VAT)

To receive a registration form for the event please contact the IEE Events
Office,Savoy Place, London WC2R 0BL, tel: +44 (0)20 7344 5732/5733,
fax: +44 (0)20 7497 3633 or email: [log in to unmask]

Accommodation

For anyone requiring hotel accommodation, the IEE recommends that you
contact the Greater Glasgow and Clyde Valley Tourist Board for
information on +44 (0)141 221 0049.

Organisers

The Seminar has been organised by Mounia Lalmas (Queen Mary & Westfield
College), Alison Cawsey (Heriot-Watt University) and Keith van Rijsbergen
(University of Glasgow) - all members of IEE Informatics Professional Group A4
(Artificial intelligence) - in association with the British Computer
Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group.

Web page:

http://WWW.iee.org.uk/Events/a11nov99.htm




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