ECIR 2010 | 32nd European Conference on Information Retrieval | The Open University
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Industry Day 2010

Invited Speakers


Hinrich Schütze
IR, NLP, and visualization
In the last ten years natural language processing (NLP) has become an essential part of many information retrieval systems, mainly in the guise of question answering, summarization, machine translation and preprocessing such as decompounding. However, most of these methods are shallow. More complex natural language processing is not yet sufficiently reliable to be used in IR. I will discuss how new visualization technology and rich interactive environments offer new opportunities for complex NLP in IR.

Short Bio: Hinrich Schütze is best known for co-authoring the standard reference book on statistical natural language processing (http://nlp.stanford.edu/fsnlp/) (Google Scholar lists more than 4,700 citations of this book). His new book "Introduction to Information Retrieval" (http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval-book.html) (co-authored with Chris Manning and Prabhakar Raghavan) was published in 2008 and has already been adopted by many IR courses throughout the world. Dr. Schütze obtained his PhD from Stanford University and has worked for a number of Silican Valley companies, including two large search engines and several text mining startups. He is currently Chair of Theoretical Computational Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart (www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~schuetze/).
Barry Smyth
Web Search Futures: Personal, Collaborative, Social
In this talk we will discuss where Web search may be heading, focusing on a number of large-scale research projects that are trying to develop the "next big thing" in Web search. We will consider some important recent initiatives on how to improve the quality of the Web search experience by helping search engines to respond to our individual needs and preferences. In turn, we will focus on some innovative work on how to take advantage of the inherently collaborative nature of Web search as we discuss recent attempts to develop so-called "social search engines"

Short Bio: Barry Smyth is a Professor of Computer Science in University College Dublin. Barry Graduated with a PhD in Computer Science from Trinity College Dublin in 1996 and his research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, case-based reasoning, and information retrieval with a core focus on recommender systems and personalization technologies. In 1999 Barry co-founded ChangingWorlds as a UCD campus company to commercialize personalization technologies for the mobile sector, helping to grow the company to more than 150 people before it was acquired by Amdocs Inc. in late 2008. Today Barry is the Director of CLARITY, the SFI-funded Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, and a joint initiative between University College Dublin, Dublin City University, and the Tyndall National Institute.
Mirella Lapata
Image and Natural Language Processing for Multimedia Information Retrieval
The third ECIR keynote was given by the winner of the Karen Spärck Jones Award, Mirella Lapata of Edinburgh University. A video of the keynote speech by Mirella Lapata is available to view online. Download the slides Download the slides | PDF, read the Q&A Session

Ayse Göker of City University, London, presented the 2009 Karen Spärck Jones Award:
The Information Retrieval Specialist Group of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, (BCS IRSG) in conjunction with the BCS has created an award to commemorate the achievements of Karen Spärck Jones.

Karen was an Emeritus Professor of Computing and Information at the University of Cambridge and one of the most remarkable researchers in computer and information science. She made outstanding and highly influential contributions to the fields of Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) especially with regards to experimentation, which continue to resonate today and are set to do so for many years to come. Karen's achievements resulted in her receiving many prestigious accolades including the ACM Salton Award for her significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval, the BCS Lovelace medal, and the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award.

The Karen Sparck Jones Award is established to encourage and promote talented researchers who have endeavoured to advance our understanding of Information Retrieval and/or Natural Language Processing with significant experimental contributions, and will be awarded annually.

The Award is sponsored this year by Microsoft Research Cambridge. It is open to all IR and/or NLP researchers who have no more than 10 years post-doctoral or equivalent experience. The decision is taken by an international panel of experts in the fields. The Award includes a cash sum and a trophy. The trophy (on display) is a glass design of baskets – reflecting Karen's interest in and collection of baskets. The Award is open internationally and we encourage nominations from anyone who believes they have a suitable candidate in mind. The deadline for 2010 Award is October. Flyers containing further details of the Award are also available near the registration area if it's not in your pack.

On behalf of BCS IRSG and BCS, it gives me great pleasure to announce that first recipient of the KSJ Award winner for 2009 is Mirella Lapata. Mirella is at the University of Edinburgh. She is a Reader (Assoc Prof) within the School of Informatics there. Her research has focused on various problems in NLP mostly with an emphasis on statistical methods and text generation applications. She has worked on complex problems like:
    word sense disambiguation, ambiguity resolution, semantic vector space, story generation, and many others.
Mirella Lapata tackles challenging problems in a broad range of topics. She is commended for careful evaluation and innovative ways to set up new experiments to investigate hypotheses. Those supporting her nomination commented that her work goes the extra mile to make very convincing cases.

Lapata produces high-quality research results with a formidable publication record including best paper awards at international conferences.

Mirella's presentation today will be in a different format. She is due to give birth within a few days and has been unable to travel to ECIR. However, we have arranged for a video/slide show presentation and also for a mechanism to address any questions. We will note any questions and pass them on to her for answering later, these Q&As will then be made available via the ECIR website within next few days, allowing for her circumstances!