Call for Industry Track Proposals

This year’s SIGIR conference will include an Industry Track, following very successful events at SIGIR in recent years. The Industry Track will be held on Wednesday, 15th August 2012, during the regular conference program, and in parallel with the technical tracks.

The Industry Track's objectives are three-fold. The first objective is to present the state of the art in search and search-related areas, delivered as keynote talks by influential technical leaders from the search industry. The second objective of the Industry Track is the presentation of interesting, novel and innovative ideas related to information retrieval. Finally, a highly-interactive panel session will conclude the track, topic to be announced.

Speakers confirmed so far include:

• Andrei Broder (Speaker) - Distinguished Scientist, Google, USA
• Eric W. Brown (Speaker) - Research Scientist, Watson Technologies, IBM, USA
• Susan Dumais (Speaker) - Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, USA
• David Hawking (Panel Chair) - Chief Scientist, Funnelback, Australia
• Thomas Hofmann (Speaker) - Director of Engineering, Google Zurich, Switzerland.
• Dan Rose (Speaker) - Chief Scientist, Search, A9.com, USA

Industry authors are invited to prepare proposals for presenting interesting, novel and innovative IR ideas, and submit these by email to the Industrial Track co-chairs by 7th May, 2012. The proposal should contain:

• Short company portrait (125 words)
• Short CV of the presenter(s) (125 words)
• Title and abstract of the presentation (500 words)
• Reasons why the presentation should be interesting to the SIGIR audience

When submitting a proposal, please bear in mind the following:

• Ensure the presentation is relevant to the SIGIR audience (the Call for Papers gives a good idea of the conference scope).
• Try to highlight interesting R&D challenges in the work you present.
• Please do not present a sales pitch.
• All slides will be made public (no confidential information on the slides; you will be expected to ensure your slides are approved by your company before being presented).
• Presenters may opt to have their presentation videoed and made public, and if so, the presenter will be asked to sign a release form.

We look forward to receiving your submissions by email (see the email addresses below), and welcoming you to the SIGIR 2012 Conference and to the Industry Track.

Important Dates

• 07 May 2012: Industry Track proposals due
• 08 June 2012: Notification of proposal acceptance
• 15 August 2012: Industry Track presentations

Industry Track Co-Chairs

• Udo Kruschwitz, University of Essex (udo@essex.ac.uk)
• Su-Lin Wu, Yahoo! Labs, (sulin@yahoo-inc.com)