The 29th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference was held at the UW campus in Seattle, August 6-11, 2006. Organized by the Information School, the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) and SIGIR (Special Interest Group for Information Retrieval), the conference focused on all aspects of information storage, retrieval and dissemination, including research strategies and system
evaluations.
More than 700 people registered for paper and poster sessions, tutorials and workshops on topics ranging from Evaluating Exploratory Search Systems and Personal Information Management to Web Advertising and Open Source Information Retrieval.
Several iSchoolers played key roles in making the ACM SIGIR 2006 conference a tremendous success. Efthimis Efthimiadis, an Associate Professor in the iSchool, was the General Chair of the conference and responsible for a wide range of technical, social and logistical arrangements for the conference. In addition, Wanda Pratt was the Doctoral Consortium Co-Chair, David Hendry was the Posters/Demonstrations Co-Chair, Williams Jones organized a Tutorial and a Workshop on the topic of Personal Information Management, and Michael Crandall was the Local Arrangements Chair.
This year’s conference attracted a record-breaking 399 paper submissions representing the work and studies of researchers in information retrieval in more than 35 countries. Susan Dumais, Affiliate Professor at the iSchool and a researcher within Microsoft's Research division, and her colleagues presented two papers and a poster on information retrieval including one on improved methods for ranking search results.
"It is astounding that we can find anything at all on the Internet -- it contains 20 billion pages with no central organization – but there is still a lot of room for improvement," says Dumais, who carries the title of principal researcher and is one of the dozens of Microsoft researchers focused on search technology.
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Dumais is looking for ways to teach a search engine to take into account previous Web or desktop searches. She believes a major drawback of existing searches is the inability of the engines to incorporate much information in a query. “In desktop search, users know a lot about what they are looking for,” says Dumais, “and searches should take a much richer context into account." That will change in the future, she adds.
Dumais is among several professors at the iSchool who teach and conduct research on information retrieval, human-computer interaction, information behavior in communities and information systems design.
The iSchool thanks this year’s corporate sponsors: include Boeing, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, IBM Research, Thomson West, Amazon and Ask.com.
To learn more about SIGIR06 or see photos from the conference, visit http://www.sigir2006.org.
Whatever your dreams in life, you'll need the right information at the right time to reach your goals. Our job at the iSchool is to help you flourish by marshaling information and technology to serve you. We do that when we apply our expertise to important questions and nurture the minds of future professional leaders. The iSchool believes that connecting people with knowledge is of fundamental individual and societal importance.