The International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of research related to the foundational aspects of Information Retrieval (IR). ICTIR grew from a series of SIGIR workshops on mathematical and formal methods for IR held during the years 2000 to 2005. In 2007, ICTIR became a full conference and was held held biennially (2007 Budapest, Hungary; 2009 Cambridge, U.K.; 2011 Bertinoro, Italy; 2013 Copenhagen, Denmark), supported by the BCS-IRSG.

In 2014 ICTIR became a fully-sponsored ACM conference with BCS-IRSG maintaining its support. Starting in 2015, ICTIR will be held annually. In 2015, ICTIR will be hosted by the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. See http://ictir2015.org/ for details.

We are now soliciting bids for organizing ICTIR 2016. ICTIR should be held on a different continent than that on which SIGIR takes place. Since SIGIR 2016 is going to be held in Europe, we are looking for bids from non-European locations. Informal bids (“expression of interest”) may be sent by July 22, 2014. The deadline for formal bids is Sept 8, 2014. See the full call for details.