SIGIR NEWSACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting 2021:
Secretary’s Notes
Claudia Hauff
Delft University of Technologyc.hauff@tudelft.nl

1Opening Matters

The 2021 ACM SIGIR Annual Business Meeting took place twice during the week of SIGIR (July11-15, 2021) to accommodate participants from different time zones. It was led by the chair of
the SIGIR Executive Committee (EC), Ben Carterette.
The virtual meeting started with Ben thanking all volunteers for their work. Our volunteers are
Nattiya Kanhabua, Guido Zuccon (both in the role of information directors), Barbara Poblete,Hussein Suleman, Suzan Verberne (all DEI chairs), Nazli Goharian, Hannah Bast (who lead
Women in IR), Tirthankar Ghosal, Josiane Mothe, Julián Urbano (our Forum editors), HannahBast, Gianluca Demartini, Ryen White (our awards chairs), Jaime Arguello (the student travelawards chair), Jiaxin Mao, Andrew Yates (both as student affairs chairs), Nicola Ferro, Johanne
Trippas (heading the artifact review committee) and Donna Harman (the SIGIR historian).
By now, we have had one full year of virtual events, starting at CHIIR 2020 which was supposed
to take place in Vancouver, Canada in March 2020 but had to be canceled and held eventually inAugust 2020 as a virtual event. Every ACM SIGIR sponsored event has had at least one online
event by now. This was made possible by organizers who were not afraid to try new things andput in a lot of effort to make their conferences accessible no matter the participants’ timezones.
ECIR 2020 taught us a lot about how to run a virtual conference. JCDL 2020 decided to delay
and ended up taking place right after SIGIR 2020. SIGIR 2020 reported very strong attendancenumbers. And here we are again—online—at SIGIR 2021.

2Paper Awards

Next up were the paper awards of ICTIR (co-located with SIGIR) and SIGIR.

2.1

ICTIR 2021

ICTIR this year avoided the usual short/long paper categories but instead gave authors free range
within a minimum (2) and maximum (9) page length plus references.

ACM SIGIR Forum

1

Vol. 55 No. 2 December 2021

At ICTIR 2021, the Best Paper Award went to ERR is not C/W/L: Exploring the Relationship Between Expected Reciprocal Rank and Other Metrics by Leif Azzopardi, Joel Mackenzieand Alistair Moffat.
The Best Student Paper Award was awarded to Effective and Privacy-preserving Federated
Online Learning to Rank by Shuyi Wang, Bing Liu, Shengyao Zhuang and Guido Zuccon.
Lastly, the student paper The Impact of Entity Cards on Learning-Oriented Search Tasks bySara Salimzadeh, David Maxwell and Claudia Hauff received an Honorable Mention.

2.2

SIGIR 2021

At SIGIR, the Best Paper Award went to the work Computationally Efficient Optimizationof Plackett-Luce Ranking Models for Relevance and Fairness by Harrie Oosterhuis—a very rare
single-author best paper award!
The Best Student Paper Award was awarded to Dynamic Modality Interaction Modelingfor Image-Text Retrieval by Leigang Qu, Meng Liu, Jianlong Wu, Zan Gao and Liqiang Nie.
The paper Contextualized Offline Relevance Weighting for Efficient and Effective Neural Retrieval by Xuanang Chen, Ben He, Kai Hui, Yiran Wang, Le Sun and Yingfei Sun received theBest Short Paper Award.
SIGIR 2021 also awarded three Honorable Mentions: Follow the Prophet: Accurate Online Conversion Rate Prediction in the Face of DelayedFeedback by Haoming Li, Feiyang Pan, Xiang Ao, Zhao Yang, Min Lu, Junwei Pan, Dapeng
Liu, Lei Xiao and Qing He received a Best Short Paper Honorable Mention.
 ReadsRE: Retrieval-Augmented Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction by Yue Zhang,
Hongliang Fei and Ping Li also received a Best Short Paper Honorable Mention.
 Causal Intervention for Leveraging Popularity Bias in Recommendation by Yang Zhang,
Fuli Feng, Xiangnan He, Tianxin Wei, Chonggang Song, Guohui Ling and Yongdong Zhang
received a Best Paper Honorable Mention.

2.3

SIGIR Test of TimeAt SIGIR, the Test of Time Award recognizes research that has had long-lasting influence,
including impact on a subarea of information retrieval research, across subareas of information
retrieval research, and outside of the information retrieval research community. The winning paper
is selected from the set of full papers presented at the main SIGIR conference 10-12 years before.
The 2021 ACM SIGIR Test of Time Award went to the SIGIR 2011 paper Exploiting
geographical influence for collaborative point-of-interest recommendation by Mao Ye, Peifeng Yin,
Wang-Chien Lee and Dik-Lun Lee. Here is what the awards committee said about the paper:“This paper presents novel methods for point-of-interest recommendation for locationbased social networks (Foursquare, Whrrl, etc.). This is an important and timely
topic—at the time this was published, and it still is today. The paper has amassed
over 1000 citations, considerably more than any of the other eligible papers, in the tenyears since it was first published in 2011. For the past six full years, it has received
over 100 citations per year and is on track to repeat this again in 2021. The paper
ACM SIGIR Forum2Vol. 55 No. 2 December 2021

considers traditional social network and collaborative filtering features and the role ofgeographic influence (effectively POI proximity, both to users and to each other) inPOI recommendation. The resultant unified framework fuses user preferences, social
influence, and geographic influence for state-of-the-art POI recommendation. The paper also offers insights about the performance of certain features and algorithms, which
can be useful for practitioners. Given the prevalence and reach of location-based social
networks, the methods and the insights have significant practical implications.”
The 2021 ACM SIGIR Test of Time Honorable Mention went to Portfolio theory ofinformation retrieval (SIGIR 2009) by Jun Wang and Jianhan Zhu. The awards committee says:“The Portfolio Theory of Information Retrieval remains as important today as it waswhen it was accepted for SIGIR 2009. The paper recognizes key limitations in the probability ranking principle (PRP) and proposes to address these limitations by applying
well established results from economic portfolio theory. Economic portfolio theory allows risk to be traded off against return. In much the same way that a person might
diversify a portfolio of stocks in order to get a good return without incurring morerisk than they can tolerate, the portfolio theory of information retrieval allows a searchengine to trade relevance off against diversity to provide a better overall experience.
Since modern ranking methods continue to focus primarily on the PRP, we could easily
see this paper accepted for publication at SIGIR 2021, with only some modest updates
to the experiments. Overall, it is a beautifully written paper, a model for a theoreticallyoriented SIGIR paper.”3SIGIR Academy

The newly formed ACM SIGIR Academy1 honors and recognizes individuals who have madesignificant, cumulative contributions to the development of the field of IR in research innovation
and/or service.
The inaugural inductees are: James Allan, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Nicholas Belkin, AndreiBroder, Jamie Callan, William Cooper, W. Bruce Croft, Susan Dumais, Edward Fox, OphirFrieder, Norbert Fuhr, Marti Hearst, Kalervo Järvelin, Thorsten Joachims, Noriko Kando, Diane
Kelly, Michael Lesk, Yoelle Maarek, Alistair Moffat, Marc Najork, C. J. van Rijsbergen, StephenRobertson, Tefko Saracevic, Ellen Voorhees and ChengXiang Zhai.
For the Class of 2022 nominations are accepted until December 31, 2021.

4

Official Recognition for SIGIR Members

ACM’s most prestigious member grade (ACM Fellow ) recognizes the top 1% of ACM members fortheir outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding
service to ACM and the larger computing community. In 2020, James Allan became an ACM
Fellow.
1

https://sigir.org/awards/sigir-academy/

ACM SIGIR Forum

3Vol. 55 No. 2 December 2021

Also in 2020, Carlos Castillo, Kevyn Collins-Thompson and Jianfeng Gao became ACM Distinguished Members. This members’ grade recognizes those ACM members with at least 15 years
of professional experience and 5 years of continuous Professional Membership who have achieved
significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field.

5Treasurer’s Report

SIGIR treasurer Min Zhang presented SIGIR’s finances. Our finances are in a healthy state: abig part of the yearly expenses are student travel grants (in recent years more than $200K acrossa number of sponsored conferences) which were way down due to all conferences moving online.
While student travel grants still exist of course, they are used for conference registrations only
which tend to be lower than in previous years. Overall, we have about half the expenses of lastyear. Our publication expenses are stable.

6Conferences

The meeting continued with a report by Jimmy Huang about SIGIR 2020, the first virtual SIGIR
conference. Attendance was at an all-time high with 1,500 attendees, 40% of whom were students.
Video reports by the two upcoming SIGIR conferences followed: SIGIR 2022 in Madrid, Spainis expected to be a hybrid event. SIGIR 2023 in Taipei, Taiwan is expected to take place as anin-person conference.
A bid for SIGIR 2024 in Cancun, Mexico was presented.
For 2025, SIGIR asks for bids from Europe, the Middle East or Africa. In 2026, SIGIR will beheld in Asia-Pacific.
Ben pointed out that in light of COVID the schedule for conference bidding has been compressed to a two-year cycle.
Lastly, upcoming conferences were discussed: JCDL 2021 takes place online in September 2021
with CIKM 2021 following online in October. WSDM 2022 is expected to take place in Tempe,
Arizona in February 2022. CHIIR 2022 will be in Regensburg in March and is currently planning
for a hybrid event. ICTIR 2022 will be held at SIGIR 2022 on the workshop day.

7sigir.org Redesign

The redesign of the SIGIR website2 is in full swing. The designs created in the past year are
currently being implemented.

8SIGIR ForumThe new SIGIR Forum editors worked hard to get SIGIR Forum back on the ACM Digital
Library—and with success. The Forum articles can now be found there as well.3 The editors
23

https://sigir.org/
https://dl.acm.org/newsletter/sigir

ACM SIGIR Forum

4Vol. 55 No. 2 December 2021

also created new easier-to-use LATEX templates. With the redesign of sigir.org the SIGIR Forum will soon have a beautiful new home.

9Audience Comments and Questions

During the last part of the business meeting the floor was opened to the audience. A number ofsuggestions were made and questions were raised: As a community we should think more about co-locating IR conferences (once they happen
in-person again) to save travel costs and reduce our carbon footprint. There are concerns
though: (i) this is likely to lead to fewer deadlines spread throughout the year; (ii) for someparticipants traveling for prolonged periods of time is not possible. If all conferences would
opt for a hybrid model (instead either online or in-person), participants could choose how
to attend each conference.
 Where do we as a community stand in terms of open access? In other research communities(NLP, ML) publications are open access and we put ourselves at a disadvantage by not being
open access. This is an ongoing issue that the EC has been addressing with ACM for sometime.
 What is the future of the EC? Should more roles be added to it?

ACM SIGIR Forum5Vol. 55 No. 2 December 2021