ANNUAL REPORT for SIGIR, July 1999 - June 2000
Susan Dumais, Chair SIGIRSIGIR again had a busy and fruitful year in 1999-2000, sponsoring or co-sponsoring
several successful conferences, and offering a number of new member services.
Although we continued to suffer a small decline in membership, the decline was less thanthe ACM SIG mean, and attendance at sponsored conferences continued to increase.
New officers were installed at the SIGIR'99 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) wereappointed regional representatives to the SIGIR Executive Committee. The regional
representatives are appointed by the executive committee to increase our internationalrepresentation. SIGIR's 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 researchersand practitioners, and we anticipate that its influence will continue to grow.
In October 1999, ACM held its Program review of SIGIR, a process that happens once
every five years to insure that SIGs are continuing to serve their technical community.
SIGIR was unanimously renewed as a multi-service SIG. Slides from the Chair’s
presentation at the meeting are available on the SIGIR web site. In addition, during thepast year the Salton Award Committee worked on selecting the sixth recipient of theGerard Salton Award. This award is SIGIR’s highest technical award and honors
significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval.
The award was first presented in 1983 (to Gerard Salton) and every three years starting in1988. The 2000 award winner is Stephen Robertson. The other recipients of the award
are Karen Sparck-Jones (1988), Cyril Cleverdon (1991), William Cooper (1994), andTefko Saracevic (1997). The 2000 recipient (Steve Robertson) was announced at theSIGIR’2000 Annual Meeting.
The main conference during this period was the Twenty Second Annual ACM SIGIR
International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval(SIGIR), http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/conferences/sigir99/. The 1999 meeting was heldin Berkeley, California (USA). Fred Gey (UC Berkeley) served as the General
Conference Chair, and Marti Hearst and Richard Tong as Program Co-Chairs. As in thepast, this was a quite successful meeting, both intellectually and financially. More than430 people attended the conference. In addition to the main technical program, there wasa strong program of eleven tutorials preceding the meeting with more than 300 units
attended, and a varied workshop program following the meeting with more than 180
attendees. Financially the 1999 conference was very successful generating a profit of$60,000 (est). The awards committee selected three submissions for awards -- Best
Paper: Jian-Yun Nie, Michel Simard, Pierre Isabelle, Richard Durand (Universite doMontreal), "Cross-language information retrieval based on automatic mining of paralleltexts from the web”. Best Student Paper Award: Owen de Krester, Alistair Moffat(University of Melbourne), "Efficient document presentation with a locality-basedsimilarity heuristic". Best Poster: Michael Witbrock, Vibhu Mittal (Just Research),"Ultra-summarization: A statistical approach to generating highly condensed nonextractive summaries". The submissions, attendance and awards all reflect a strong
international participation in SIGIR and that is especially gratifying. A growing amountof student travel to SIGIR is supported by a SIGIR budget item and by contributions fromthe 1998 conference in Melbourne.
SIGIR is also involved in the sponsorship of two other ACM conferences, CIKM and DL.
CIKM'99, the 8th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management,
wasco-sponsoredbySIGIR,SIGMIS,andSIGGROUP(http://www.csee.umbc.edu/cikm/1999/). The 1999 meeting was held in Kansas City,Missouri. Kai Makki and E.K. Park served as General Conference Co-Chairs, and Susan
Gauch and Il-Yeol Song served as Program Co-Chairs. CIKM '99 had 229 attendees.
Financially, the conference was quite successful, with a surplus of $43,000. Eachsponsoring SIG received its share of the surplus. CIKM has a strong focus on databasesin combination with information retrieval and management techniques. This year there
was good representation of work on web databases and data warehousing techniques.
Keynote addresses by Lee Giles (NEC Research) and James Scoggins (NCRCorporation) focused on these two new directions.
DL'99, the Fourth ACM Conference on Digital Libraries, was held in Berkeley,
California (http://fox.cs.vt.edu/DL99/).
DL'99 was co-sponsored by SIGIR andSIGWEB. DL'99 immediately preceded SIGIR’99 with some shared workshops andtutorials. This pairing of conferences provides a complimentary theoretical and practicalperspective on information access and management. Neil Rowe was the General Chair ofDL’99, with Ed Fox serving as the Program Chair. Neil stepped in as General chair inDecember (for an August conference) and did a great job in pulling together a finetechnical and social program in an important area. Attendance for the main conference
was 281, with 152 attending six tutorials before the conference and 156 attending five
workshops after the conference. The conference was also successful financially, with asurplus of $40,000, half of which was returned to SIGIR. The Vannevar Bush Award forBest Paper was presented to: David Bainbridge (University of Waikato), Craig G. NevillManning (Rutgers University), Ian H. Witten, Lloyd A. Smith, and Rodger J. McNab(University of Waikato) for their paper "Towards a Digital Library of Popular Music".
DL’00 was also held this past year and was co-locate with Hypertext in San Antonio,Texas in early June (http://www.dl00.org/). Peter J. Nürnberg and David L. Hicks served
as Conference Co-Chairs for both conferences, with Rick Furuta serving as Program
Chair. There was a strong program of 23 full papers, 21 short papers, 11 tutorials and 7workshops. The Vannevar Bush Award for Best Paper was presented to: Joanna Wolfe(University of Texas at Austin) for the paper "Effects of Annotations on Student Writers".
Because the conference was just recently completed, there are no final attendance orfinancial figures available yet, but by informal accounts it was a successful DLconference.
Two very important changes are in store for the ACM Digital Libraries conference. For
the first several years, DL was co-located with an established conference, SIGIR andHypertext in alternating years. Because of the growing interest and reputation of theconference, beginning in 2001, DL will operate on its own without co-location. For thelast several years, the ACM DL Steering Committee worked hard to merge of ACM DL
and IEEE ADL conferences, and final merger documents were approved recently by both
ACM and IEEE. In 2001, the First ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries willtake place in June (http://www.jcdl.org). We look forward to a meeting with evenbroader appeal, capitalizing on its strengths in research, practice, systems and policy
issues surrounding digital libraries. We thank the ACM DL Steering Committee (inparticular our SIGIR representative, Nick Belkin) for its very hard and careful work increating a new, richer DL forum. SIGIR and SIGWEB will continue to be equal cosponsors of the series, along with IEEE’s technical committee on digital libraries(TCDL).
In addition, the three ACM conferences that SIGIR sponsors, we “cooperate” withseveral other IR-related conferences but have no financial stake in them. Theseconferences compliment the technical focus of our own conferences, and include work on
hypertext, multimedia, Asian languages, etc. As a cooperating society, SIGIR members
obtained reduced registration fees at these conferences. This year, SIGIR had “incooperation” agreements with: ACM:HT’00 (Hypertext), ACM:MM’00 (MultiMedia),
ACM:CUU’00 (Conference on Universal Usability), RIAO 2000 (Recherched’Informations Assistee par Ordinateur), IRAL’00 (IR with Asian Languages), andAH’00 (International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-basedSystems).
Thanks again are due to the editors of SIGIR Forum, Bill Hersh and Fazli Can, who havesuccessfully developed this journal into both a news forum and an important scientificforum. This past year, the Forum moved online for the first time and we will look inways to use this more timely publication avenue. The online forum is available at
http://www.acm.org/sigir/forum/. For the time being, a print version of the Forum will
also be continued. During the year Bill Hersh stepped down as Forum editor and was
replaced by Mark Sanderson (University of Sheffield). We thank Bill for his many
contributions to the Forum and welcome Mark.
SIGIR's Information Officer, Charles Viles (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,USA), did a fine job expanding the SIGIR home page, adding an archive of the IR-List,and providing support to move the SIGIR Forum online. The SIGIR Web site has
become an important resource for IR researchers and practitioners, and we anticipate thatits influence will continue to grow.
Although interest in information retrieval is growing and SIGIR-sponsored conferences
are seeing steadily increasing attendance, membership continues to slowly decline. Somenew membership services have been developed to help address this issue and to provide
better service to our continuing members. We have developed a new Membership Value
Plus (MVP) option, which allows SIGIR members to get both the DL and CIKM
Proceedings at cost. SIGIR-sponsored conference proceedings will soon be available on
the SIGMOD Anthology CDs. This has the two fold advantage of providing added
visibility for IR research, and providing database-related content to our members at lowcost. We continue to look for other ways to enhance our membership, including a more
active publicity campaign, offering new online membership services, and developing
stronger ties with related organizations including more joint meetings. Since our problem
is common to many ACM SIGs, we also look to them for collaboration in addressing thisissue.
SIGIR had a productive and successful year, with important intellectual and socialcontributions. Our conferences have been remarkably successful in all senses (withespecially strong technical content and good international participation), and our financial
situation is quite healthy. We will continue to work on ways to improve membershipbenefits, student and international participation, and relevance to industrial members. We
look forward with great anticipation to the next year, and hope to see many new faces, aswell as many familiar ones, at upcoming meetings.