This award provides support for U.S. researchers to participate in the Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval, to be held in Lorne, Victoria, Australia in February 2012. The goal of the workshop is to explore and define long-range research issues of general and personal information management in the context of information that is constantly changing, that is in a diverse set of formats, and that is stored in numerous locations. This workshop brings together about 40 junior and senior researchers from around the world with expertise spanning the information retrieval, information science, and search communities to develop common understandings and goals of the long-term challenges and opportunities. The workshop will explore at least the following questions: (1) How can Information Retrieval algorithms be adapted to this new paradigm where information is distributed, multimedia, and dynamic? (2) In this setting, what are the key challenges that researchers, graduate students, and funding agencies should be aware of? (3) How can the successful evaluation models for Information Retrieval be extended to this setting where data availability and privacy are major challenges? (4) How should teaching about Information Retrieval be modified to reflect likely changes in the field?
This workshop is expected to yield research directions that will impact the information retrieval and science research and development communities as well as research groups that tackle problems arising within this context (e.g., machine learning, human computer interaction). The immediate beneficiaries of the workshop's publications will include graduate students, faculty members, industrial researchers, and developers of search-related technology. In addition, it is expected that general users of search tools will benefit from resulting advances in technology. Results addressing the questions above will be disseminated on a dedicated website (www.cs.rmit.edu.au/swirl12/) and will also be published in the widely distributed SIGIR Forum newsletter and its web site.
During a three-day workshop in February 2012, 45 Information Retrieval researchers met to discuss long-range challenges and opportunities within the field. This grant provided partial travel and accommodation support for 11 academic and industrial Information Retrieval researchers from the United States who attended the workshop (an additional five US-based researchers funded their own costs). Three of the 11 were women. The result of the workshop is a diverse set of research directions, project ideas, and challenge areas. A report of more than 30 pages describes the workshop format, provides summaries of broad themes that emerged, includes brief descriptions of all the ideas, and provides detailed discussion of six proposals that were voted "most interesting" by the participants. The report was published in the SIGIR Forum, a newsletter of the major professional organization related to the field. It is thus archived in the ACM Digital Library, but is also freely available only at http://sigir.org/forum as well as on the workshop web site, www.cs.rmit.edu.au/swirl12. Key themes include the need to: move beyond ranked lists of documents to support richer dialog and presentation, represent the context of search and searchers, provide richer support for information seeking, enable retrieval of a wide range of structured and unstructured content, and develop new evaluation methodologies. As demonstrated by the volume of ideas proposed during this workshop, here at the start of the seventh decade of IR research, the field of information retrieval continues to be both a strong and vibrant research area. The themes in the proposals show a worldwide research community identifying topics of future work that go far beyond the abilities of existing commercial search providers. The opportunities to extend the abilities of IR systems are wide ranging and diverse. While heterogeneous in their views of where future trends in IR lie, delegates were consistent in their view that the SWIRL 2012 workshop was a stimulating opportunity to discuss and debate new ideas as well as to interact with other leading researchers.
