FROM THE CHAIR
This past February, I was privileged to be part of a three-day workshop called SWIRL, a workshop that looked
into the future of Information Retrieval and proposed a number of exciting research directions, challenge areas,and project ideas. The workshop participants assembled an exciting list of ideas and wrote them up into a reportof more than 30 pages. The report appears in this issue of the Forum and I hope you will give it a thoroughreading. Though I suspect it will be particularly good material for graduate students looking for thesis areas orearly career researchers looking to start new projects, even established researchers will certainly find interestingideas scattered throughout the report.
In the previous newsletter, I reported that the survey from summer 2011 indicated support from the IR community
for using reserve funds to increase student travel support. As a trial, SIGIR has provided a modest level offunding for the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, a contest that encourages high school
students to work on linguistic and logic puzzles. At the business meeting, the SIGIR Executive will propose aprocess for extending this funding more broadly. Of course, SIGIR continues to fund travel to the SIGIR
conference itself. We are also exploring ways to extend that support to conferences SIGIR co-sponsors, but in a
way that is fair to all sponsors.
I hope most of you noticed the ACM Turing Centenary Celebration (http://turing100.acm.org) that SIGIR has
partially sponsored. As a sponsor, SIGIR received support for a handful of students to travel to the event. Inaddition, we are assured that all of the talks and panels at the event will be available on-line afterward for those
who could not make it.
For those interested in history more recent than Turing, the SIGIR “museum” has recently been updated with newcontent. This site (http://sigir.org/museum/contents.html) includes copies of papers, books, and reports from the1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. The files are scans of the original documents, so are often quite large, but they
can be interesting reading. (Ever checked to see how the often-used Rocchio feedback model was defined? Takea peek at Rocchio’s thesis.) The SIGIR Executive is also interested in your ideas for projects that could beundertaken to make the most of the data.
I hope that you are planning to attend SIGIR 2012, to be held in Portland, Oregon, this August. In addition to anexcellent technical program, this year’s conference includes the announcement of the next Salton Award recipient,an award presented every three years to someone making significant and sustained contributions to the field.
Looking forward, the SIGIR 2013 conference is scheduled to be in Dublin, Ireland. In 2014 the conference will
be in Gold Coast, Australia. The 2015 venue will be announced at the business meeting in Portland. SIGIR iscurrently requesting bids for 2016, open to locations within Europe and Africa. It will have been in Dublin(2013), Geneva (2010), Amsterdam (2007), Sheffield (2004), Tampere (2002), and Athens (2000). If you’reinterested in hosting SIGIR in 2016 or want to encourage someone else to host it, start planning now. SIGIR
welcomes proposals for locations at its business meeting. See http://sigir.org/bid.html for details.
SIGIR is also sponsoring JCDL 2012 in Washington, D.C. (June), CIKM 2012 in Maui, Hawaii (OctoberNovember), and WSDM in Rome, Italy (February 2013). I hope that you are able to attend and/or submit yourwork to any or all of these conferences.
As always, please touch base with me or any other member of the executive if you have any issues that you feelshould be discussed at the business meeting. If you wish to help with any of the SIGIR work, please let us know.
In particular, the nomination process for the next SIGIR Executive committee will be starting in a few months andyour involvement will be greatly appreciated.

James Allan
chair_sigir@acm.org

ACM SIGIR Forum1Vol. 46 No. 1 June 2012