SIGIR NEWS

Chair’s Letter
Ben Carterette
Spotifycarteret@acm.org
Dear IR community,
It is happening again. Conferences that were planning to host in-person events in the first halfof 2022 are switching to fully virtual events. WSDM 2022 is the latest to do so, following CHIIR
2022 which made the switch in December. While this is disappointing for all of us that werehoping to travel again, and especially heartbreaking for the conference organizers, it is clearly theright thing to do given lockdowns and travel restrictions being reinstated in countries around theworld. We continue to plan for a hybrid SIGIR 2022 with an in-person event in Madrid, taking
into account the possibility of COVID-related restrictions that may reduce its size—-or force us
to cancel altogether.
Fortunately our virtual events continue to be successful, the latest being SIGIR 2021, with ICTIR 2021 co-located for the first time, JCDL 2021, and CIKM 2021. On behalf of the community,
I extend a huge thank you to the General co-Chairs of SIGIR 2021, Fernando Diaz, Chirag Shah,and Torsten Suel, for the hard work they did to make the conference feel like an in-person SIGIR,and the Program co-Chairs, Pablo Castells, Rosie Jones, and Tetsuya Sakai, for putting together
a great technical program. ICTIR 2021 General Chair Faegheh Hasibi, Program co-Chairs Yi
Fang and Akko Aizawa, and Steering Committee Chair Tetsuya Sakai did a wonderful job organizing the first instance of the conference co-located with SIGIR. Finally, much gratitude to JCDL
2021 General Chair J. Stephen Downie and Program co-Chairs Dana McKay and Hussein Superman, and to CIKM 2021 General co-Chairs Gianluca Demartini and Guido Zuccon and Program
co-Chairs Shane Culpepper, Zi Huang, and Hanghang Tong.
Personally I am grateful to have had the privilege to present our slate of SIGIR awards atthe conference in July. This may be the best part of being Chair! First, the ACM SIGIR SaltonAward, recognizing career achievement in the field. It was a honor to chair the selection committeeof past Salton Award winners, and to be able to present ChengXiang Zhai as the latest recipient.
Next, the inaugural class of the SIGIR Academy: James Allan, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Nicholas
Belkin, Andrei Broder, Jamie Callan, William Cooper, W. Bruce Croft, Susan Dumais, EdwardFox, Ophir Frieder, Norbert Fuhr, Marti Hearst, Kalervo Järvelin, Thorsten Joachims, NorikoKando, Diane Kelly, Michael Lesk, Yoelle Maarek, Alistair Moffat, Marc Najork, C. J. van Rijsbergen, Stephen Robertson, Tefko Saracevic, Ellen Voorhees, ChengXiang Zhai. I highly recommend the video1 that our Awards co-Chair Ryen White produced to give a chance to all thewinners to say a few words!
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http://ryenwhite.com/sigiracademy/WhiteSIGIRAcademy2021.mp4

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Then our paper award winners: for ICTIR 2021, Best Student Paper winners Shuyi Wang, BingLiu, Shengyao Zhuang, and Guido Zuccon; Best Paper winners Leif Azzopardi, Joel Mackenzie,and Alastair Moffaat; for SIGIR 2021, Best Short Paper winners Xuanang Chen, Ben He, Kai
Hui, Yiran Wang, Le Sun, and Yingfei Sun; Best Student Paper winners Leigang Qu, Meng Liu,
Jianlong Wu, Zan Gao, and Liqiang Nie; and finally Best Paper Award winner Harrie Oosterhuis.
Congratulations again to all the winners.
As always, the SIGIR Executive Committee meeting schedules, agendas, and minutes are available publicly2 . We also continue to take suggestions from the community for agenda items for ourmeetings3 . Though we have slowed down our meeting schedule lately, we are always interested inhearing from the community.
Best regards,Ben Carterette
Chair, ACM SIGIR Executive Committee

23In a Google Doc linked here: http://bit.ly/SIGIR-EC-agenda
In a Google Form linked here: http://bit.ly/SIGIR-EC-form

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