[Corpora-List] New Informer - Spring 2012

Thu May 3 10:16:31 UTC 2012

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 (cgurrin at computing.dcu.ie) 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: irsg at bcs.org.

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/

-- 
Dr Udo Kruschwitz
University of Essex
School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester
CO4 3SQ
U.K.

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