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Parent organization | Association for Computing Machinery |
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| Website | sigir |
SIGIR is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. The scope of the group's specialty is the theory and application of computers to the acquisition, organization, storage, retrieval and distribution of information; emphasis is placed on working with non-numeric information, ranging from natural language to highly structured data bases.
The annual international SIGIR conference, which began in 1978, is considered the most important in the field of information retrieval. SIGIR also sponsors the annual Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) in association with SIGWEB, the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) in association with SIGKDD, SIGMOD, and SIGWEB.
| Number | Year | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 22 | 1999 | Berkeley, California |
| 23 | 2000 | Athens |
| 24 | 2001 | New Orleans |
| 25 | 2002 | Tampere |
| 26 | 2003 | Toronto |
| 27 | 2004 | Sheffield |
| 28 | 2005 | Salvador, Bahia |
| 29 | 2006 | Seattle |
| 30 | 2007 | Amsterdam |
| 31 | 2008 | Singapore |
| 32 | 2009 | Boston |
| 33 | 2010 | Geneva |
| 34 | 2011 | Beijing |
| 35 | 2012 | Portland, Oregon |
| 36 | 2013 | Dublin |
| 37 | 2014 | Gold Coast, Queensland |
| 38 | 2015 | Santiago |
| 39 | 2016 | Pisa |
| 40 | 2017 | Tokyo |
| 41 | 2018 | Ann Arbor |
| 42 | 2019 | Paris |
| 43 | 2020 | Xi'an, China |
| 44 | 2021 | Montreal |
| 45 | 2022 | Madrid |
| 46 | 2023 | Taipei |
The group gives out several awards to contributions to the field of information retrieval. The most important award is the Gerard Salton Award (named after the computer scientist Gerard Salton), which is awarded every three years to an individual who has made "significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval". Additionally, SIGIR presents a Best Paper Award [1] to recognize the highest quality paper at each conference. "Test of time" Award [2] is a recent award that is given to a paper that has had "long-lasting influence, including impact on a subarea of information retrieval research, across subareas of information retrieval research, and outside of the information retrieval research community". This award is selected from a set of full papers presented at the main SIGIR conference 10–12 years before.
The ACM SIGIR Academy [3] [4] is a group of researchers honored by SIGIR. Each year, 3-5 new members are elected (in addition to other "very senior members of the IR community" who will be "automatically" inducted) for having made significant, cumulative contributions to the development of the field of information retrieval and influencing the research of others. These are the principal leaders of the field, whose efforts have shaped the discipline and/or industry through significant research, innovation, and/or service.
Here are the inductees into the SIGIR Academy by year:
| Year | New members |
|---|---|
| 2021 | James Allan, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Nicholas Belkin, Andrei Broder, Jamie Callan, William Cooper, W. Bruce Croft, Susan Dumais, Edward Fox, Ophir Frieder, Norbert Fuhr, Marti Hearst, Kalervo Järvelin, Thorsten Joachims, Noriko Kando, Diane Kelly, Michael Lesk, Yoelle Maarek, Alistair Moffat, Marc Najork, C.J. van Rijsbergen, Stephen Robertson, Tefko Saracevic, Ellen Voorhees, ChengXiang Zhai |
| 2022 | Charles L. A. Clarke, William Hersh, Jian-Yun Nie, Maarten de Rijke, Jaime Teevan, Justin Zobel |
| 2023 | Nick Craswell, Nicola Ferro, Jimmy Lin, Tetsuya Sakai, Ryen W. White, Yiming Yang |
| 2024 | Fernando Diaz, Donna Harman, Mounia Lalmas, Mark Sanderson, Yiqun Liu |
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, reporting nearly 110,000 student and professional members as of 2022. Its headquarters are in New York City.
Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an information need. The information need can be specified in the form of a search query. In the case of document retrieval, queries can be based on full-text or other content-based indexing. Information retrieval is the science of searching for information in a document, searching for documents themselves, and also searching for the metadata that describes data, and for databases of texts, images or sounds.
SIGCOMM is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications, which specializes in the field of communication and computer networks. It is also the name of an annual 'flagship' conference, organized by SIGCOMM, which is considered to be the leading conference in data communications and networking in the world. Known to have an extremely low acceptance rate (~10%), many of the landmark works in Networking and Communications have been published through it.
Gerard A. "Gerry" Salton was a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time, and "the father of Information Retrieval". His group at Cornell developed the SMART Information Retrieval System, which he initiated when he was at Harvard. It was the very first system to use the now popular vector space model for Information Retrieval.
The SMART Information Retrieval System is an information retrieval system developed at Cornell University in the 1960s. Many important concepts in information retrieval were developed as part of research on the SMART system, including the vector space model, relevance feedback, and Rocchio classification.
The Gerard Salton Award is presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) every three years to an individual who has made "significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval". SIGIR also co-sponsors the Vannevar Bush Award, for the best paper at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
Susan Dumais is an American computer scientist who is a leader in the field of information retrieval, and has been a significant contributor to Microsoft's search technologies. According to Mary Jane Irwin, who heads the Athena Lecture awards committee, “Her sustained contributions have shaped the thinking and direction of human-computer interaction and information retrieval."
SIGKDD, representing the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, hosts an influential annual conference.
SIGMOD is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data, which specializes in large-scale data management problems and databases.
Nicholas J. Belkin is a professor at the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University. Among the main themes of his research are digital libraries; information-seeking behaviors; and interaction between humans and information retrieval systems. Belkin is best known for his work on human-centered Information Retrieval and the hypothesis of Anomalous State of Knowledge (ASK). Belkin realized that in many cases, users of search systems are unable to precisely formulate what they need. They miss some vital knowledge to formulate their queries. In such cases it is more suitable to attempt to describe a user's anomalous state of knowledge than to ask the user to specify her/his need as a request to the system.
Human–computer information retrieval (HCIR) is the study and engineering of information retrieval techniques that bring human intelligence into the search process. It combines the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and information retrieval (IR) and creates systems that improve search by taking into account the human context, or through a multi-step search process that provides the opportunity for human feedback.
Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that underlies most modern search engines. She was an advocate for women in the field of computer science. She even came up with a slogan: "Computing is too important to be left to men." In 2019, The New York Times published her belated obituary in its series Overlooked, calling her "a pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field." From 2008, to recognize her achievements in the fields of information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), the Karen Spärck Jones Award is awarded to a new recipient with outstanding research in one or both of her fields.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to information science:
W. Bruce Croft is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose work focuses on information retrieval. He is the founder of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval and served as the editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Information Systems from 1995 to 2002. He was also a member of the National Research Council Computer Science and Telecommunications Board from 2000 to 2003. Since 2015, he is the Dean of the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was Chair of the UMass Amherst Computer Science Department from 2001 to 2007.
David Ron Karger is an American computer scientist who is professor and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Norbert Fuhr is a professor of computer science and the leader of the Duisburg Information Engineering Group based at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany.
SIGWEB is a Special Interest Group of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on hypertext, hypermedia, and the World Wide Web. SIGWEB was named SIGLINK until November 1998.
Monika Henzinger is a German computer scientist, and is a former director of research at Google. She is currently a professor at the University of Vienna. Her expertise is mainly on algorithms with a focus on data structures, algorithmic game theory, information retrieval, search algorithms and Web data mining. She is married to Thomas Henzinger and has three children.
John D. Lafferty is an American scientist, Professor at Yale University and leading researcher in machine learning. He is best known for proposing the Conditional Random Fields with Andrew McCallum and Fernando C.N. Pereira.
ChengXiang Zhai is a computer scientist. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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