WINTER SCHOOL REPORTPROMISE Winter School 2012
Information Retrieval
meets
Information Visualization
Maristella Agosti
University of Padua, Italy
agosti@dei.unipd.it

Tiziana Catarci
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
catarci@dis.uniroma1.it

Nicola Ferro
University of Padua, Italy
ferro@dei.unipd.it
Henning Müller
University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland,Sierre, Switzerland
henning.mueller@hevs.ch
Giuseppe Santucci
Sapienza University of Rome, Italysantucci@dis.uniroma1.it

1Introduction

In the context of the European Union (EU) funded research project PROMISE, a winter school
was organized in the small ski resort of Zinal, Valais, Switzerland from January 23-27, 20121 .
The title of the winter school was From Information Retrieval to Information Visualizationand the goal was to bring together these two research domains that are currently quite separated
but have an important potential to help each other in advancing the fields.
Indeed, the school has been attended by participants who came from one domain or the otherand offered them the possibility of starting to acquire cross-disciplinary competencies. Interestingly enough, the school turned out to be a brainstorming and discussion opportunity also forthe lecturers, since they had the occasion of meeting colleagues from a quite different field with1

http://www.promise-noe.eu/events/winter-school-2012/

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their own perspectives on a ground of shared topics and issues, such as how to envision models
and design systems around user needs, how to consider the user interaction and context, how toconduct evaluation, an so on.
17 high quality lecturers from academia and industry were invited to speak on a large varietyof topics from introduction talks to hot topics such as crowd sourcing and social media. 62
participants from 25 countries and all continents but Australia and four organizers followed thecourses and helped to create many lively discussions and an open atmosphere with many questions.
Also most of the speakers stayed for the entire week and enriched the discussions as well.
Being in a remote place has the inconvenience to complicate organization but has the advantagethat people stay together beyond the courses, so in the free time during the day and the evenings.
This included many lively discussions accompanied sometimes by a beer. On the other hand, over
20 participants had to be rejected due to a lack of hotel room and several of the participants had
to share rooms to optimize the number of participants.

2Lectures

A total of 17 lecturers presented each time 90 minutes on a specific topic. The goal was to haveevery day aspects of information retrieval (IR) and information visualization (IV), so as to mix
the topics and interests of the participants as much as possible.
Introduction to Information Retrieval – Keith van Rijsbergen, University of Glasgow,Scotland, UK
The introduction to information retrieval explained the main concepts and history of more than 50years of the research domain of information retrieval, taking into consideration both modeling andexperimentation. After detailing the main concepts and providing reference to many interesting
papers, prof. van Rijsbergen moved to more advanced topics, such as the impact of the notion ofrelevance on its probabilistic modeling and the application of geometry and quantum probability
notions to develop an IR model.
Introduction to Information Visualization – Alan Dix, Lancaster University, UK
Similar to the introduction to information retrieval, a basic lecture in information visualization
was given by prof. Dix in a very lively fashion. He discussed the notion of visualization and its
relation with direct sensory experience, the benefits of exploiting visualization to represent dataand information, and provided several example of both static and interactive visualizations thathave been developed over the time.
HCI Principles – Maria Francesca Costabile, University of Bari, Italy
In this lecture, prof. Costabile covered the definition of Human-Computer interaction (HCI) andits multidisciplinary nature. She also talked about the notion of usability, by also providing several
examples of it. Then, she illustrated how to exploit HCI principles to design and develop usable
systems with particular reference to the notion of user experience. Finally, she introduced how toapply HCI principles to the evaluation of systems.

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HCI View of Information Retrieval Evaluation – Tiziana Catarci, Sapienza, Universityof Rome, Italy
Prof. Catarci tried to combine the domains of information retrieval, human-computer interaction,and usability to come up with a HCI viewpoint on IR evaluation where user interface techniques,interaction measures, usability models and usability evaluation can actually help in carry out
evaluation of IR systems. To this end, she presented several IR evaluation metrics and measuresof information needs with the goal of sketching a framework for usability evaluation in IR.
User-oriented Information Retrieval – Elaine Toms, University of Sheffield, UK
This lecture went into the details of the different models of information which describe the information use environment and position information retrieval within the real word context. Inparticular, prof. Toms covered the issue of describing the problem space entailed by information
retrieval in context and discussed the notion of “search task” as one step in the processing ofperforming a larger “work task” that is part of “work system” that may be impacted by situation.
Evaluating User-oriented IR, Kalervo Järvelin, University of Tampere, Finland
Prof. Järvelin explained the basic concepts of evaluation, ranging from batch laboratory evaluation
to user-centered evaluation, linking this concepts to the previous lectures on user-oriented IRand HCI view on IR evaluation. He introduced the notion of simulation, as a kind of bridge
between laboratory evaluation and user-centered evaluation. Finally, he presented the evaluationof operational systems and discussed how evaluation both needs a theory of the system being
evaluation and helps to construct a theory such system.
Multilingual Information Retrieval – Jacques Savoy, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Prof. Savoy presented the many aspects and challenges of multilingual information retrieval andalso the differences of meaning in the same languages. He discussed the problems related to indexing multilingual documents – e.g. encoding, word decompounding, stemming – the translation
problem and different alternatives for it, and matching queries and documents in a multilingual
scenario. Many practical examples made it clear how difficult the multilingual and multicultural
aspects of information retrieval are.
Multimedia Information Retrieval – Stéphane Marchand-Maillet, University of Geneva,
Switzerland
The presentation on multimedia retrieval showed many of the difficulties to extract useful datafrom multimedia data such as images and videos and use this alone or in combination with textfor retrieval. The presentation also explained many of the currently used techniques including
machine learning applications that have helped to leverage multimedia retrieval and make it auseful tool in many specialized application domains. Multimedia data analysis is very different
from text analysis and the semantic gap, the mismatch between user interpretation and machinecomprehension of multimedia raw data still persists.

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Bibliometrics/Scientometrics and IR – Peter Ingwersen, Royal School of Library andInformation Science, DenmarkThe lecture introduced the concepts and definitions of bibliometrics, scientometrics, and Webometrics and how IR is necessary to support the data collection and analyses of these disciplines.
Then, prof. Ingwersen discussed how to conduct reference and citation analysis and provided
several examples of visualizations which allow us to study the evolution of a research fields, e.g.
in terms of its authors and their relationships.
TREC Style Evaluation– Donna Harman, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA
The presentation provided many insights on the motivation, history, and benefits of laboratoryevaluation. Starting from the early work of Cleverdon for the Cranfield experiments, dr. Harman
discussed the whole methodology concerning test collection creation and the related issues, such ascompleteness and robustness of the relevance judgments, and provided many examples concerning
the TREC evaluation campaign. Moreover, she provided students with a series of how-tos about
participation in evaluation campaigns, re-use of existing collections in your own experimentation,and design of your own test collection.
Metrics, Statistics, Tests – Stephen Robertson, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UKProf. Robertson provided many insights about metrics and the type of variables you can observe
and went into the details of the IR evaluation tradition. He covered metrics based on relevanceand assumptions about them, he presented work on commercial Web search engines, and discussed
on questions of statistical significance. Finally, he gave an outlook of possible future directions
beyond Cranfield, such as considering session rather than single queries or focusing on information
rather than documents.
Number Visualization – Giuseppe Santucci, Sapienza, University of Rome, Italy
Prof. Santucci discussed on how to present and visualize quantitative information via tables andgraphs. In particular, he provided several examples of good and bad graphs in order to distilla set of guidelines and rules to be followed. Then, he presented the basic rules of quantitative
perception and the role of interaction in information visualization and provided two examplesof application of such concepts to the visualization of experimental results coming from the IRevaluation.
Visual Analytics – Silvia Miksch, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria
The lecture presented the motivations for visual analytics, meant as the science of analyticalreasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. Prof. Miksch discussed how visual analytics
intersects three areas, namely visualization and interaction, computation and mining, and humanperception and cognition. She introduced several examples of visual and interactive prototypes
with a particular focus on text and document visualizations and visual analytics of time-oriented
data.

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Web Personalisation – Owen Conlan and Vincent P. Wade, Trinity College Dublin,
Ireland
The lecture concerned the motivations behind personalization in the Web and its potential impact.
Dr. Conlan defined personalisation, presented several of its dimensions, the techniques for adapting
content, and the approaches for user modelling. The whole problem of personalization has beenthen framed in the wider context of the history and evolution of adaptive hypermedia and casestudies from the CULTURA and AMAS projects have been discussed.
Log File Analysis – Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Prof. de Rijke discussed log analysis from the standpoint of the behaviour – observable activities
of a person, a team, a system – we can detect and record in log files. He highlighted how logs
allow us to trace data and actions and not just to have access to isolated snapshots. He presented
the impact of log analysis, in terms system design and optimization and improvement of models
of user interaction and behaviour. Several examples of logs have been introduced and several
techniques for analysing them have been explained. Finally, a number of uses of log files has been
discussed such as, for example, query expansion and suggestion, simulation, learning to rank, andinterleaved comparison.
Crowdsourcing – Gareth Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland
Prof. Jones talked about crowdsourcing as a form of human computation and how the availability of crowdsourcing services is now making human computation easily available to the researchcommunity. He provided several examples of implicit or explicit crowdsourcing systems and alternative platforms which are available to develop and implement them. Then, he discussed theissues involved in crowdsourcing, such as recruitment, reputation, payment and incentives, andspam detection. Finally, he applied crowdsourcing to IR evaluation and presented MediaEval asa case study.
Retrieval from Social Media – Alejandro Jaimes, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain
Dt. Jaimes presented an intriguing view of what social media are, how they are shaping our lives,
and why it is important to leverage on them both from a research and a commercial perspective.
He discussed several examples of social media and application built over them, as well as how
to exploit them for retrieval purposes. Finally, he discussed some future directions and possible
interesting research issues on this topic.

3Poster session

All participants had the possibility to present their own work during the first day of the winterschool at the evening welcome reception that took two hours and started many discussions among
the participants.
An evaluation and selection of the posters has been performed and a symbolic best poster
award – a bottle of excellent Swiss wine – has been attributed to the three best posters.

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4Conclusions

The fact that participants were remaining close together during all five days of the winter schooland had many possibilities to meet with the other participants and the lecturers gave place tomany discussions and to a stimulating environment for both the participants and the lecturers.
Altogether the PROMISE winter school can be seen as a great success in connecting two
research domains and allowing a large number of participants to get in contact with high quality
lecturers and give them hopefully a better view of the research domains and also on the ways thatthey can evaluated their own research and profit from tools of visualization that are available. Most
participants gave a very positive feedback and hopefully the proceedings of the winter school will
also help to keep the main outcomes of the winter school available for the future and persons who
could unfortunately not participate.
An analysis of the evaluation forms after the winter school highlighted that most students verymuch enjoyed (more than 90% of the participants) the winter school and the atmosphere among
participants and with the lecturers. Most presentations were liked (about 90% of the participants)
but sometimes the introductory presentations were regarded as too simply for a majority of PhD
students. The students were generally interested in the different topics offered by the school(about 90% of the participants) The place in a remote alpine valley was very much appreciatedbut the lack of a professional conference room and of limited infrastructures as lunch time werealso regarded as problematic. Lectures of 90 minutes were regarded as too long and maybe short
breaks after 45 minutes would have been a better option.
The proceedings of the lectures of the winter school are currently under preparation and will
be published in the Springer Tutorials series.

Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all the lecturers and participants to the PROMISE Winter School who
gave an extremely valuable contribution and made the school a success.
We would like to thank those institutions and individuals who have made this school possible: University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland and Conférence Universitaire de Suisse
Occidentale (CUSO).
The PROMISE Winter School has been supported by: the PROMISE2 network of excellence(contract n. 258191), the Khresmoi3 (contract n. 257528) and CULTURA4 (contract n. 269973)
projects, as part of the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission, and by the ELIAS5
research networking programme of the European Science Foundation.

2

http://www.promise-noe.eu/
http://www.khresmoi.eu/
4
http://www.cultura-strep.eu/
5
http://www.elias-network.eu/
3

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