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Informer: Autumn 2014 Issue Out Now! http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/ _____________________________________________________________________ Editorial By Udo Kruschwitz Welcome to the autumn edition of Informer! For those of you who don’t know, Informer is the newsroom of the Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) of the British Computer Society. We spare no effort in getting the hottest pieces of (IRSG) news, getting the best contributors and compiling the most up-to-date list of IR-related events. What else would anybody want? Let’s jump straight in and see where ECIR 2016 is going to be hosted. ::: Read more at: http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2014/11/editorial-12/ _____________________________________________________________________ Feature Article: Mining search logs for usage patterns (Part 2) By Tony Russell-Rose In a previous post I discussed some initial investigations into the use of unsupervised learning techniques (i.e. clustering) to identify usage patterns in web search logs. As you may recall, we had some initial success in finding interesting patterns of user behaviour in the AOL log, but when we tried to extend this and replicate a previous study of the Excite log, things started to go somewhat awry. In this post, we investigate these issues, present the results of a revised procedure, and reflect on what they tell us about searcher behaviour. ::: Read more at: http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2014/11/mining-search-logs-for-usage-patterns-pt-2/ _____________________________________________________________________ Organizational Overview: Applied Research at the Knowledge Discovery research area of the Know-Center in Graz By Roman Kern The Know-Center is Austria’s leading research centre for data-driven business and big data analytics, with the purpose to bridge the gap between industry and academia. Therefore, the state-of-the-art in science is applied to problem setting within the industry to stir innovation, and to actively research in areas not being covered currently by the research community. ::: Read more at: http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2014/11/applied-research-at-the-knowledge-discovery-research-area-of-the-know-center-in-graz/ _____________________________________________________________________ Organizational Overview: Music Information Retrieval at JKU Linz By Markus Schedl The Department of Computational Perception at the Johannes Kepler University Linz was founded in October 2004, with the appointment of Prof. Gerhard Widmer. Its mission is to develop computational models and algorithms that permit computers to perceive and understand aspects of the external world, where we interpret perception in the widest sense of the word, as the extraction of useful high-level information from complex, possibly low-level data, including text, audio, video, image, and sensor data. ::: Read more at: http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2014/11/music-information-retrieval-at-the-johannes-kepler-university-linz-austria/ _____________________________________________________________________ Book Review: Graph-Based Clustering and Data Visualization Algorithms By Song Chen The book, authored by Ágnes Vathy-Fogarassy and Janos Abonyi presents the topic of graph-based clustering and presents several algorithms. Besides introducing several related methods in representing and clustering a network, the authors also proposed a novel clustering algorithm to cluster and visualize the datasets. The first part of the book talks about vector quantization methods and different ways to represent graphs with vectors and to reduce the dimensionalities. The second part of this book introduces a few clustering algorithms including Neighborhood Based algorithm, Minimal Spanning Tree Clustering and Jarvis-Patrick Clustering algorithms. The last part of this book deals with high dimensional data and introduces a few ways to reduce the dimensionalities. ::: Read more at: http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2014/11/book-review-graph-based-clustering-and-data-visualization-algorithms-2/ _____________________________________________________________________ Events Autumn 2014 By Andy Macfarlane ::: Read more at: http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2014/11/events-autumn-2014/ _____________________________________________________________________ ::: Opportunities for Authors ::: If you are an expert in information retrieval or any aspect of search who has strong writing skills, we invite you to contribute to Informer. Please send an article proposal to us at: [log in to unmask] For more information about the BCS IRSG, please go to: ::: http://irsg.bcs.org/about.php _____________________________________________________________________ ::: About Informer ::: Informer is the quarterly newsletter of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG). Its aim is to provide insights and inspiration to researchers and professionals working in all aspects of search and information retrieval. Our articles provide accessible and timely coverage of important topics, ranging from focused, practical advice, to concise overviews of broader topics, and to deeper, research-oriented articles and opinion pieces. The IRSG is a Specialist Group of BCS. Its mission is to provide a focus for the European IR community, facilitate communication between researchers and practitioners and promote the adoption of IR research within industry. We host a major European conference (ECIR) and provide an associated programme of workshops, seminars and events. The IRSG is free to join via the BCS website, which provides access to further IR articles, events and resources. BCS is the industry body for IT professionals. With members in over 100 countries around the world, BCS is the leading professional and learned society in the field of computers and information systems. _____________________________________________________________________ ::: Visit Informer at http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/ ::: If you have comments, questions, or suggestions for Informer, please contact us at [log in to unmask]