UD to host International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) will hold its International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) at the University of Delaware from Sept. 13-16. Information Retrieval (IR) is the major discipline behind web search engines like Google.

Ben Carterette, associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, and Hui Fang, David L. and Beverly J.C. Mills Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, are co-organizing the conference.

“With the increasing amount of information being generated every day, various IR systems such as web search engines and recommendation systems have become commonly used tools that help users effectively organize, access and utilize the information,” says Fang.

“ICTIR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of research related to the foundational aspects of IR. We expect to welcome participants from both academia and industry. To our best knowledge, ICTIR 2016 is probably the first ACM-sponsored conference to be held in Delaware.”

According to Carterette, the call for papers attracted submissions from all over the world. The program committee reviewed 79 contributions — 44 full papers and 35 short — and accepted 22 long papers and 19 short papers, all of which will be presented orally during the conference.

“We received four excellent tutorial proposals as well, and we hope those will aid in laying down foundational ideas in information retrieval research,” he said.

The conference program will open with a keynote by Sandra Carberry, professor in computer and information sciences and in linguistics.

The conference is sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR), Microsoft Research, J.P. Morgan Chase, and the University of Delaware.

For more information, visit the website.