Informer: Spring 2012 Issue Out Now!
http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/
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Editorial
By Udo Kruschwitz
Welcome back! What a busy period this has been since our winter issue had come
out, and what a lot of activities. Most of the editorial team has just returned
from an excellent ECIR 2012 in Barcelona and you can read more about the
conference in this issue (a small challenge: spot the editors in the photos in
this issue of Informer). Just a quick subjective two-word summary of the
conference's main theme: social networks.
::: Read more at: http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2012/04/editorial-2/
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Conference Review: ECIR 2012 Industry Day
By Franco Maria Nardini
The annual BCS IRSG European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2012)
was held in Barcelona, Spain, this year. The 34th edition of the conference has
been organized by Yahoo! Research, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Barcelona
Media, supported by BCS IRSG and ACM SIGIR.
The conference represented a valuable moment for researchers to share their
results. Very interesting papers have been presented during the three days of
the conference.
::: Read more at:
http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2012/04/conference-review-ecir-2012-industry-day/
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Book Review: Search Analytics for Your Site
By Tyler Tate
Financial services company The Vanguard Group had just purchased a shiny new
search engine to improve search for their 12,000 employees. There was only one
problem: the search results were worse than what they had before.
John Ferrara, an information architect who had helped select the new search
platform, blew the whistle, asking the project to be delayed so that relevancy
could be improved before the search engine went live. Unfortunately, he failed
to make a convincing case to his IT colleagues.Technically, the new platform
was running just fine. Besides, the search vendor undoubtedly new more about
this kind of stuff than the internal guys.
::: Read more at:
http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2012/04/book-review-search-analytics-for-your-site/
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Conference review: ECIR 2012
By Claudia Hauff
ECIR 2012 took place in Barcelona at a campus of the Pompeu Fabra University
which is situated not far from the city centre. Despite the size of the city,
most ECIR participants stayed around the same area and wherever you went, you
inadvertently bumped into a few other fellow attendees every day & night.
The conference started off with the tutorials and workshops on Sunday, though
at 9:30am a lot of people still looked a bit bleary-eyed. It proved to be a
popular day, a large number of people attended and the workshop organizers did
their best to make it a fun and interactive event.
::: Read more at:
http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2012/04/conference-review-ecir-2012/
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Call for Book Reviews
By Cathal Gurrin
Periodically we will be sending out a Call for Reviews in which we seek
reviewers for a number of recently published books that may be of interest to
the IR community. Instead of including book reviews in this issue of Informer,
we would like to issue a call for interested parties to review one of the books
listed below. Books will be allocated for review on a first-come-first-served
basis and you would have about one month to carry out the review. If you are
interested in reviewing one of these books, please let Cathal know
([log in to unmask]) which book you are interested in reviewing and we
will arrange for a copy (paper or online format) to be sent to you along with
review guidelines. For examples of previous book reviews, see the most recent
issues of Informer. The currently available books (courtesy of our good friends
at Springer) are:
::: Read more at: http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2012/04/call-for-book-reviews/
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Conference Review: ECIR 2011
By Cathal Gurrin
ECIR 2011, the 33rd European Conference on Information Retrieval and the BCS
IRSG's flagship annual conference was organised by Dublin City University in
cooperation with the University of Sheffield, and was supported by the
Information Retrieval Specialist Group at the British Computer Society
(BCS-IRSG) and the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR).
It was held during four days (18-21) of April 2011 in Dublin, during a week
that was uncharacteristically warm and sunny.
::: Read more at:
http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2012/04/conference-review-ecir-2011/
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The Information Needs of Mobile Searchers
By Tyler Tate
We live in a post-desktop era. In the UK alone, 45% of Internet users used a
mobile phone to connect to the Internet in 2011 [7], and Morgan Stanley
predicts that by 2014 there will be more mobile Internet users than desktop
Internet users globally [6]. Not only are more people connecting with mobile
devices, but they're also consuming more and more data. Mobile data usage more
than doubled every year between 2008 and 2011, and is predicted to grow from
0.6 exabytes per month in 2011 to 6.3 EB/month in 2015 [3]. The numbers are
impressive, but all it really takes is a quick glance at the people around us
to recognize that mobile Internet is pervasive.
::: Read more at:
http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2012/04/the-information-needs-of-mobile-searchers/
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Designing Faceted Search: Getting the basics right (pt 2)
By Tony Russell-Rose
In our last post we looked at some of the fundamental issues in designing
faceted search such as layout (e.g. where to place the faceted navigation
menus) and state (e.g. whether they should be open or closed by default). In
this post, we continue the mini-series with a review of the various formats for
displaying facets and the key principles for choosing between them.
::: Read more at:
http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2012/04/designing-faceted-search-getting-the-basics-right-pt-2/
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Events Diary
By Andy Macfarlane
::: Read more at: http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2012/03/events-spring-2012/
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::: 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
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::: 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 assopciated 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.
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::: Visit Informer at http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/
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