ANNUAL REPORT for SIGIR, July 2001 - June 2002
http://www.acm.org/sigir
Submitted by: Susan Dumais, Chair SIGIRSIGIR again had a busy and fruitful year in 2001-2002, sponsoring or co-sponsoring several
successful conferences, and offering new member services. The current officers are: SusanDumais, Chair; Susan Gauch, Vice-Chair; Liz Liddy, Secretary, and Jamie Callan, Treasurer.
In our continuing effort to make SIGIR a truly international organization, two regional
representatives are appointed by the executive committee and serve as part of the SIGIR-EC.
Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO, Australia) and David Harper (The Robert Gordon University, UK) are
the regional representatives. SIGIR's Information Officer, Eric Brown (IBM, USA) does a finejob publishing materials on the SIGIR home page (http://www.acm.org/sigir). The SIGIRForum Editors, Mark Sanderson and Peter Anick, round out the SIGIR team.
Conferences:
SIGIR sponsors, co-sponsors and cooperates with other technical groups on several
conferences and workshops during the year. The main conference is the annual SIGIR
meeting. We also co-sponsors two other ACM conferences, CIKM and JCDL.
SIGIR.
The Twenty Fourth Annual ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research andDevelopment in Information Retrieval (SIGIR’01, http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~sigir01/) was heldin New Orleans, LA USA. Don Kraft (Louisiana State University) served as the General
Conference Chair, and Bruce Croft, David Harper and Justin Zobel served as Program CoChairs. The meeting was scheduled from Sept 9-12, and needless to say was disrupted bythe events of Sept 11. We thank Don and his team as well as the hotel for being
accommodating during this time, and the attendees for making the most of the difficult
situation. This was a successful meeting in which 46 full papers, 32 posters, and 9
demonstrations were presented. In addition, there was a strong program of 8 tutorials
preceding the meeting, and a varied workshop program following the meeting. There were360 attendees for the main conference, 217 for workshops and 153 for tutorials. Theconference was successful financially as well returning $28k to SIGIR. The awardscommittee selected two submissions for awards -- Best Paper Award: James Allan, Rahul
Gupta, Vikas Khandelwal (Univ. of Massachussets), Temporal summaries of news topics, andBest Student Paper: Adnike Lam-Asesina, Gareth Jones (Univ. of Exeter), Applying
summarization techniques for term selection in relevance feedback.
In order to increase the breadth of perspectives and approaches represented at SIGIR, amentoring program was introduced, keynote speakers from related disciplines chosen, andstudent travel support was increased. Three keynote speakers, Tom Mitchell (WhizbangLabs), Tomasz Imielinski (Rutgers University) and Eduard Hovy (USC), gave insightful
overviews of work in three fields closely related to information retrieval. In another effort toincrease the breadth of work represented in SIGIR, we offered a Mentoring Program to assist
authors who have not previously had a full length paper accepted to SIGIR. The program
was great success with 16 participants during its first year and will be repeated in 2002. We
thank Dave Lewis, who chaired the program, and all the mentors for their efforts inbroadening the scope and quality of SIGIR papers. A growing amount of student travel toSIGIR is supported by SIGIR in its budget, by contributions from the 1998 SIGIR conferencein Melbourne, and by an IBM student travel grant. Seventeen students from North America,
South America, Europe, Middle East and Asia received support to attend the 2001 meeting.
The submissions, attendance and awards all reflect a strong international and student
participation in SIGIR.
CIKM.
CIKM'01, the Tenth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management,
was co-sponsored by SIGIR and SIGMIS (http://www.cikm.org/2001). The 2001 meeting washeld in Atlanta, GA USA. Carlton Pu served as General Conference Chair, and David
Grossman and Ling Liu served as Program Co-Chairs. CIKM has a strong focus ondatabases in combination with information retrieval and management techniques. This year

there was good representation of new work on web databases and structured data. Keynote
addresses by Alfred Spector (IBM), Mike Stonebraker (MIT), and panels the Web andDatabase Functionality and Security of Data and Documents focused on these newdirections. There were 60 papers, 10 industry session papers, and 15 posters. The
conference continues to improve in quality and provide a bridge between the database andinformation retrieval communities. In spite of restricted travel schedules last fall, theconference was well-managed and made a $15k profit, half of which was returned to SIGIR.
JCDL.
The First Joint ACM/IEEE Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’01) was held in Roanoke,
VA USA from June 24-28, 2001 (http://www.jcdl.org/). The conference was co-sponsored by
ACM (SIGIR and SIGWEB) and IEEE (TCDL), and represents the merging of what had
previously been two separate digital library conferences (ACM’s DL conference and IEEE’sADL conference). We thank the ACM DL Steering Committee (in particular our SIGIR
representative, Nick Belkin) for its very hard and careful work in creating a new, richer DL
forum for discussions of research, practice, systems and policy issues surrounding digitallibraries. Ed Fox served as Conference Chair for the inaugural conference, with Christine
Borgman serving as Program Chair. There was a strong program of 40 full papers, 36 shortpapers, 9 panels, 10 demos, 16 posters, 6 tutorials, and 3 workshops plus the NSF DLI PI
meeting. The Vannevar Bush Award for Best Paper was presented to: Gregry Crane, Clifford
Wulfman and David Smith for their paper "Building a hypertextual digital library in thehumanities: A case study on London”. This was a very successful inaugural conference withmore than 425 conference attendees, and more than 150 involved in tutorials and workshops.
A small $3k net was split among the sponsoring organizations. The Second JCDL
conference (JCDL’02) is being held in Portland OR USA from July 14-18, 2002, with Bill
Hersh serving as the General Conference Chair. Details about this meeting will be reported
in next years Annual Report.
In addition the three ACM conferences that SIGIR sponsors, we “cooperate” with several
other IR-related conferences but have no financial stake in them. These conferencescompliment the technical focus of our own conferences, and include work on hypertext,multimedia, adaptive systems, etc. As a cooperating society, SIGIR members obtained
reduced registration fees and other member benefits at these conferences. This past year,
SIGIR had “in cooperation” agreements with: RCDL’01 (Russian Conference on DigitalLibraries), AH’02 (International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Webbased Systems), CIA’02 (Collaborative Information Agents), and ASIS&T’01 (AmericanSociety for Information Science and Technology).
Other Activities - Publications, Member Programs:
SIGIR's Information Officer, Eric Brown, 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. TheSIGIR Web site has become an important resource for IR researchers and practitioners, andwe anticipate that its influence will continue to grow. In addition to providing information about
the organization, the SIGIR web site also hosts the SIGIR Forum and SIG-IRList sites.
The Forum presents current coverage of IR conferences, workshops and symposia, as well
as reflections like the Salton Award Lecture and keynote addresses and current research.
The Forum appears both online (http://www.acm.org/sigir/forum/) and in paper. The online
Forum provides a more timely publication avenue and we look toward developing this as amore interactive forum for IR information. Fazli has recently stepped down as Forum editor,
and is being replaced by Peter Anick. We thank Fazli for his many years of hard work on theForum, Mark for his ongoing work, and look forward to working with Peter.
The SIG-IRList is a SIGIR-sponsored electronic newsletter,(http://www.acm.org/sigir/sigirlist/). The IRList provides a regular newsletter of IR informationand nicely compliments the archival publication SIGIR Forum. The SIG-IRList contains job
announcements, notices of publications, conferences, workshops, calls for participation, andproject announcements. Special thanks are due to Mark Sanderson and Asaad Alberair(Univ. of Sheffield) for their work in starting and providing ongoing energy for this importantsource of current awareness about a wide range of topics and opportunities in IR.

SIGIR started a Member Value Plus (MVP) program last year. The package offers the basic
benefits of SIGIR membership, including the SIGIR Forum and SIGIR Proceedings. Inaddition the conference proceedings from the two co-sponsored meetings, three ACM
conferences, CIKM and JCDL, are included. It’s a great value and an easy way to get all theSIGIR conference proceedings. The number of members taking advantage of the MVP
program increased from 31 last year to 84 this year. For more information on joining the MVP
program, see http://www.acm.org/sigir/forum/S2000/Member_Plus.pdf
SIGIR has been active in digitizing content so member can easily access materials from theSIGIR Proceedings and Forum. The Proceedings of all SIGIR conference from 1978 topresent are available electronically in the ACM Digital Library. There will also soon bethavailable in a 25 Anniversary SIGIR CD. In addition, all issues of the SIGIR Forum from1974 to the present have been digitized. This collection of materials forms a wonderful
resource for new researchers in the field. We would like to thank several of our members
who made personal copies of these materials to us for copying – Stephen Robertson, Donna
Harman, Bruce Croft, Dagobert Soergel, Ernst Schuegraf, and Jack Minker. We are still
missing some copies of the Forum from 1965-1972. If you have copies, please contact
Susan Dumais (sdumais@microsoft.com) who will arrange for copying.
Interest in information retrieval is growing rapidly, SIGIR-sponsored conferences are seeing
solid attendance, and SIGIR membership is up from 950 in May 2001 to 1072 in May 2002, allof which are good signs. Some new membership services have been developed to attract
new members and to provide better service to our continuing members. We developed theMembership Value Plus (MVP) options. SIGIR-sponsored conference proceedings arethavailable on the SIGMOD Anthology CDs and will be part of a 25 anniversary SIGIR CD nextyear, both of which increase our visibility and the availability of our publications. We continue
to look for other ways to enhance our membership benefits, including a more active publicity
campaign, offering new online membership services, and developing stronger ties with relatedorganizations including more joint meetings.
SIGIR had a productive and successful year, with important intellectual and socialcontributions. Our conferences have been successful in all senses (with strong technicalcontent and good international participation), and our financial situation is quite healthy. We
will continue to work on ways to improve membership benefits, 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, as well as many familiar ones, at upcoming
meetings.