Nicholas Belkin, Past-Chair SIGIR and Susan Dumais, Chair SIGIR
SIGIR again
had a busy and fruitful year in 1998-1999, sponsoring or co-sponsoring several
quite successful conferences, and offering a number of member services. Although we continued to suffer a small
decline in membership, the rate of decline was slightly above the ACM SIG mean,
and attendance at conferences continues to increase.
A new set of
officers was elected and installed at the SIGIR'99 Conference in August. The new officers are: Susan Dumais, Chair; Susan Gauch,
Vice-Chair; Liz Liddy, Secretary, and Jamie Callan, Treasurer. In our
continuing effort to make SIGIR a truly international organization, Peter
Schaeuble (ETH Zurich) and Ross
Wilkinson (CSIRO) were appointed regional representatives to the SIGIR
Executive Committee. Many thanks to the outgoing officers, Nick Belkin, Chair;
Howard Turtle, Vice-Chair; Elke Mittendorf, Secretary and Susan Gauch,
Treasurer, who have all worked hard to make SIGIR a successful organization.
Our main
event during this period was, as usual the Annual Conference of SIGIR, formally
known as the Annual ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and
Development in Information Retrieval.
The 1998 meeting was held in Melbourne, Australia, and jointly hosted by
the Departments of Computer Science at the Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology and the University of Melbourne.
This was the first SIGIR conference to be held outside of North America or
Europe. The expansion of SIGIR-related
activities in the Asia-Pacific region is a strongly encouraging trend. Alistair
Moffat (University of Melbourne) and Justin Zobel (RMIT) served as the
conference Co-Chairs. As in the past,
this was a quite successful meeting, both intellectually and financially. The submissions, attendance and awards all
reflect the strong international participation in SIGIR which is especially
gratifying. More than 250 people
attended the conference. In addition to
the main technical program, there was a strong tutorial program proceeding the
meeting, and a varied workshop program following the meeting. The Best Student Paper Award went to Warren
Greiff (University of Massachusetts, Amherst); Best Non-Student Paper to Martin
Wechsler, Eugen Munteanu and Peter Schaeuble (ETH, Zurich); Best Poster to
Ming-Jer Lee and Lee-Feng Chien Academica (Sinica, Tapei). Surplus revenue which came back to SIGIR in
the form of a donation to the Student Travel Support Fund was ~$17,000.
SIGIR is also
involved in the sponsorship of two other ACM conferences, CIKM and DL.
CIKM'98, the
Seventh International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, was
co-sponsored by SIGIR and SIGMIS. The
1998 meeting was held in Bethesda, Maryland, with Niki Pissinou (University of
Southwestern Louisiana) and Charles Nichols (University of Maryland, Baltimore
County) serving as Conference Co-Chairs.
CIKM '98 had 265 attendees, up from the previous year. Financially, the conference was quite successful,
with a surplus of $36,500. Each
sponsoring SIG received $18,270 of the surplus and $4,936 of allocation to SIG
sponsors, for a total revenue of $23,206.
CIKM has a stong focus on databases and knowledge bases, but continues
to expand to more general issues of information and knowledge management. This year there was a particularly strong
representation on text summarization, clustering, classification and learning
algorithms. Keynote addresses by Alon
Levy (University of Washington) and Ed Addison (KnowledgeLink Interactive)
focused on database and knowledge management perspectives, respectively.
DL'98, the
Fourth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, was held in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. DL'98 was co-sponsored by
SIGIR and SIGWEB (formerly SIGLINK).
DL'98 was co-located with Hypertext (HT'98), the ACM Hypertext
Conference, with Rob Akscyn (Knowledge Systems) chairing both conferences.
There are no final attendance or financial figures available yet. An important event was the keynote speech by
Doug Englebart, the 1997 Turing Award winner, which was held as a joint event
of both meetings, as the close of HT'98 and the beginning of DL'98. This managed to bring both communities
together very nicely, and to demonstrate quite tangibly their relationships to
one another. DL'99 will be co-located
with SIGIR'99 in Berkeley, California. This pairing of conferences provides a
complimentary theoretical and practical perspective on information access and
management. In 2000, DL will again be
co-locate with Hypertext, and Peter J. Nürnberg and David L. Hicks will serve
as conference co-chairs for both conferences.
Because of the growing interest and reputation of the conference,
beginning in 2001, DL will operate on its own without co-location.
During 1998-1999,
members of the ACM DL Steering Committee continued their discussions on merger
of ACM DL and IEEE ADL with representatives of ADL. The idea of the merger was based on two factors: 1) the
desirability of increasing the scope of each of the meetings (that of ACM DL to
include more practical, system and policy contribuitons; and that of ADL to
include more research contributions); and, 2) the seeming undesirability of
having two competing conferences in a relatively small domain held only a few
months apart. These discussions were
unable to result in a formal merger for the 2000 meetings, but we are
optimistic that a joint meeting can be held by 2001. The DL Steering Committee consists of two representatives each
from SIGIR and SIGWEB, and the conference chairs of the immediate past two ACM
DL and ADL conferences. The Steering
Committee appoints an Advisory Committee, consisting of representatives from
organizations with strong interests in digital libraries (e.g. The Library of
Congress, the American Society for Information Science, the American Library
Association, the National Science Foundation).
Together, these two bodies maintain continuity from year to year, select
conference Chairs, and advise on the content and structure of the conferences. Future ACM DL conferences will continue to
maintain a strong research focus, but will also invite contributions in areas
such as operating system descriptions and social, economic and policy issues of
digital libraries. SIGIR and SIGWEB
will continue to be equal co-sponsors of the series.
Although
interest in information retrieval is growing, and SIGIR-sponsored conferences
are seeing steadily increasing attendance, membership continues to slowly
decline. The news has been better
recently, but this is still a major problem which the new SIGIR EC will be
addressing in the coming year. Several
avenues are being considered, including a more active publicity campaign,
offering new membership services (especially online services), and, developing
stronger ties with related organizations including more joint meetings. Since our problem is common to many ACM
SIGs, we also look to them for collaboration in addressing this issue.
SIGIR's
Information Officer, Charles Viles (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill),
did a fine job in maintaining and expanding the SIGIR home page. This has become an important resource for IR
researchers and practitioners, and we anticipate that its influence will
continue to grow. We are now
establishing a survey to determine what other information and services our
members, and potential members, would like to have added to this resource.
Thanks again
are due to the joint editors of SIGIR Forum, Bill Hersh and Fazli Can, who have
successfully developed this journal into both a news forum and an important
scientific forum. Plans are in place to
work with the information officer to move the Forum to electronic delivery
beginning in the fall of 1999.
SIGIR had a
productive and successful year, with important intellectual and social
contributions. We continue to attract
new members, our conferences have been remarkably successful in all senses, our
financial situation is quite healthy.
We look forward with great anticipation to the next year, and hope to
see many new faces, as well as many familiar ones, at this year's meetings.