Susan T. Dumais

Annual report for SIGIR, July 2001 - June 2002

SIGIR again had a busy and fruitful year in 2000-2001, sponsoring or co-sponsoring several successful conferences, and offering new member services. The current officers are: Susan Dumais, Chair; Susan Gauch, Vice-Chair; Liz Liddy, Secretary, and Jamie Callan, Treasurer. In our continuing effort to make SIGIR a truly international organization, two regional representatives are appointed by the executive committee and serve as part of the SIGIR-EC. Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO, Australia) and David Harper (The Robert Gordon University, UK) are the regional representatives. David replaces Peter Schaeuble (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) who had served as the European representative for several years. We thank Peter for his hard work. SIGIRs Information Officer, Eric Brown (IBM, USA) does a fine job in maintaining and expanding the SIGIR home page (http://www.acm.org/sigir). Eric recently replaced Charles Viles (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA) who had served as SIGIR’s Information Officer for several years. We thank Charlie for many years of hard work and enthusiasm in moving SIGIR’s resources to the web.

Better Together: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Information Retrieval

The success of information retrieval systems depends critically on both the ability of systems to efficiently and effectively retrieve information, and to support people in articulating their information needs and making sense of the results. This interdisciplinary, user-centered perspective on information systems motivated my early work on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), which sought to mitigate the disagreement between the vocabulary that authors use in writing and searchers use to express their information needs, and continues to shape my research today. Over the last two decades, search has become a core fabric of peoples everyday lives, driven by advances in understanding context, natural language, and speech. I will illustrate how new capabilities in email and virtual assistants are driven by advances in both algorithms and user modeling. As we look forward to new types of information systems that anticipate information needs, interact via richer dialogs, and integrate physical and digital information, it is more important than ever to understand and support information seekers using interdisciplinary methods and perspectives.

Overview of Special Issue

This special issue of SIGIR Forum marks the 40th anniversary of the ACM SIGIR Conference by showcasing papers selected for the ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award from the years 1978-2001. These papers document the history and evolution of IR research and practice, and illustrate the intellectual impact the SIGIR Conference has had over time. The ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award recognizes conference papers that have had a long-lasting influence on information retrieval research. When the award guidelines were created, eligible papers were identified as those that were published in a window of time 10 to 12 years prior to the year of the award. This meant that the first year this award was given, 2014, eligible papers came from the years 2002-2004. To identify papers published during the period 1978-2001 that might also be recognized with the Test of Time Award, a committee was created, which was led by Keith van Rijsbergen. Members of the committee were: Nicholas Belkin, Charlie Clarke, Susan Dumais, Norbert Fuhr, Donna Harman, Diane Kelly, Stephen Robertson, Stefan Rueger, Ian Ruthven, Tetsuya Sakai, Mark Sanderson, Ryen White, and Chengxiang Zhai. The committee used citation counts and other techniques to build a nomination pool. Nominations were also solicited from the community. In addition, a sub-committee was formed of people active in the 1980s to identify papers from the period 1978-1989 that should be recognized with the award. As a result of these processes, a nomination pool of papers was created and each paper in the pool was reviewed by a team of three committee members and assigned a grade. The 30 papers with the highest grades were selected to be recognized with an award. To commemorate the 1978-2001 ACM SIGIR Test of Time awardees, we invited a number of people from the SIGIR community to contribute write-ups of each paper. Each write-up consists of a summary of the paper, a description of the main contributions of the paper and commentary on why the paper is still useful. This special issue contains reprints of all the papers, with the exception of a few whose copyrights are not held by ACM (members of ACM can access these papers at the ACM Digital Library as part of the original conference proceedings). As members of the selection committee, we really enjoyed reading the older papers. The style was very different from todays SIGIR paper: the writing was simple and unpretentious, with an equal mix of creativity, rigor and openness. We encourage everyone to read at least a handful of these papers and to consider how things have changed, and if, and how, we might bring some of the positive qualities of these older papers back to the SIGIR program.

Annual report on SIGIR, July 1999 – June 2000

New officers were installed at the SIGIR99 Conference in August. The officers are Susan Dumais, Chair; Susan Gauch, Vice-Chair; Liz Liddy, Secretary, and Jamie Callan, Treasurer. In our continuing effort to make SIGIR a truly international organization, Peter Schaeuble (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) and Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO, Australia) were appointed regional representatives to the SIGIR Executive Committee. The regional representatives are appointed by the executive committee to increase our international representation. SIGIRs Information Officer, Charles Viles (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA), did a fine job in maintaining and expanding the SIGIR home page (http://sigir.org). This has become an important resource for IR researchers and practitioners, and we anticipate that its influence will continue to grow.