REPORT

From the Chair….
Jamie Callan
chair_sigir@acm.org
Greetings SIGIR Members. I hope that your travel preparations for the SIGIR 2006 conference inSeattle are settled, and that the only conference-related question on your mind is who will win theSalton Award this year. Come to Seattle to find out!

Record Submissions to SIGIR 2006
The number of papers submitted to the SIGIR 2006 conference continues to grow. 399 papers weresubmitted, about 9% more than last year. 74 papers were accepted, which will make SIGIR 2006 thelargest SIGIR conference so far.

Don’t Forget the ACM Digital Library
It sometimes takes quite awhile for the “special issue” of SIGIR Forum (the SIGIR conference
proceedings mailed to members) to reach you. We use inexpensive mailing options, which keeps
costs down, but is slow. However, don’t forget that you can access the SIGIR conference
proceedings immediately following the conference via the ACM Digital Library. The conference
proceedings are normally posted the week following the conference. If you subscribe to “TOCService”, the table of contents will be sent to you in an email message when the proceedings areadded to the Digital Library. An ACM web account is needed for this service, to verify your SIGIRor ACM membership.

Paper is Expensive
As mentioned in previous columns, the EC plans to move the “special issue” of SIGIR Forum (theSIGIR conference proceedings mailed to members) to CD or DVD, to help control costs. It is likelythat 2006 will be the last year that the “special issue” is printed on paper. We are interested inhearing your opinions about this change. Keep in mind that our options are limited: Either wecontinue to increase membership fees to cover costs, or we replace the paper proceedings with a CDor DVD.

Ophir Frieder Named an ACM Fellow
In January ACM announced that Ophir Frieder, the IITRI Chair Professor of Computer Science andthe Director of the Information Retrieval Laboratory at the Illinois Institute of Technology, wasnamed an ACM Fellow for contributions to search systems for distributed data. Congratulations
Ophir!

Two New IR Books
Although I don’t call every IR-related book to your attention, there are two new books that SIGIR
members may find particularly interesting. Karen Spärck Jones, who received the ACL Lifetime
Achievement award in 2004, is now honored by her colleagues with Charting a New Course: NaturalLanguage Processing and Information Retrieval. Essays in Honour of Karen Spärck Jones, edited by
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John Tait (Springer, 2005). The long-awaited TREC: Experiment and Evaluation in Information
Retrieval, edited by Ellen Voorhees and Donna Harman (The MIT Press, 2005) is also now available.

Sigir.org Redesign
If you haven’t seen the SIGIR Web site (www.sigir.org) in awhile, it is worth another look. Mounia
Lalmas, SIGIR’s Information Director, has given it a new look and feel, and has updated much of thecontent. One new feature is links to videos of talks given by well-known members of the IRcommunity. Try it out. If you have suggestions about how the Web site could be improved, let me orMounia know.

SIGIR 2009 in Boston
SIGIR received bids to host SIGIR 2009 in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. The winning bid
was from a Boston team led by James Allan (UMass) and Javad Aslam (Northeastern). The SIGIR
Executive Committee thanks David Grossman and Ophir Frieder (Chicago) and Doug Oard andJimmy Lin (Washington, D.C.) for their hard work on their bids.
Don’t forget...SIGIR 2007 will be in Amsterdam, and SIGIR 2008 will be in Singapore.

SIGIR 2010 in Europe
2010 is a European year. If you are interested in hosting SIGIR 2010, please let me know before theSIGIR 2006 conference.

New Elections on the Horizon
The terms of the current SIGIR officers end on June 30, 2007. In the coming months the SIGIR
Executive Committee will appoint a Nominations Chair to select candidates for an election that willoccur March-May 2007. As in recent elections, our goal will be a choice of three strong candidates
for each position. If you would be interested in serving as an officer of SIGIR, watch the SIGIR Web
site (www.sigir.org) for details.

New ACM Member Grades
FYI, ACM recently created two new advanced membership categories: Senior, and Distinguished. A
member may self-nominate for these new categories. There is no additional cost. See
http://www.acm.org/awards/amg_call.html for details
As always, we value your opinion. If you have ideas about how SIGIR can be improved, please letme know by email.

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