SIGIR NEWS

Chair’s Letter
Ben Carterette
Spotifycarteret@acm.org
Dear IR community,
I hope this letter finds you well. Since my last letter in December, WSDM 2021 and CHIIR
2021 have taken place as virtual events. Thanks to the organizers: for WSDM 2021, General Chairs
David Carmel, Liane Lewin-Eytan, and Elad Yom-Tov, and Program Chairs Eugene Agichtein
and Evgeniy Gabrilovich; and for CHIIR 2021, General Chairs Falk Scholer and Paul Thomas,and Program Chairs David Elsweiler, Hideo Joho, Noriko Kando, and Catherine Smith.
We now have one full year of virtual conferences under our belt—every one of our sponsoredand co-sponsored events has run virtually at least once. We’ve learned a lot, and fortunately ourevents have continued to be successful. Although there are certainly challenges, virtual conferences
present new opportunities to include people all over the world. Our aim now is to consolidate what
we’ve learned from the last year, and ensure that when conferences go back to having in-person
gatherings, we do not lose all we’ve gained in terms of accessibility.
The next event on our calendar is the big one: SIGIR 2021, running virtually starting July11, by General Chairs Fernando Diaz, Chirag Shah, and Torsten Suel, and Program Chairs Pablo
Castells, Rosie Jones, and Tetsuya Sakai. I’ve blocked out my week to participate, and I’m looking
forward to connecting with many of you there! I plan to host “office hours” for anyone who would
like to chat, but please feel free to reach out to me directly if you’d like to meet as well.
The Executive Committee is planning several events co-located with the conference. We will
host a student social, with three time zone-appropriate informal talks about career journeys; aDEI panel hosted by our DEI chairs Barbara Poblete, Hussein Suleman, and Suzan Verberne; anawards ceremony to present the inaugural class, and the 2021 class, of the new SIGIR Academy;
the yearly business meeting; and of course the Salton Award keynote!
ICTIR 2021 will be co-located with SIGIR 2021 as well, taking place on July 11. This marks anew phase for the conference, as future ICTIRs will continue to be co-located with SIGIR. Huge
thank you to General Chair Faegheh Hasibi, Program Chairs Yi Fang and Akiko Aizawa, andSteering Committee Chair Tetsuya Sakai for navigating this change to the conference.
In other news, I have been elected to the ACM SIG Governing Board Executive Committee
as one of three Members-at-Large, for a 2-year term starting July 1 (coinciding with my finalyear as SIGIR Chair). In this role I will be part of discussions and decisions around topics thatare important to our community, such as open access, DEI, reviewing standards, and hybrid
conferences. I will report on my participation in future letters.

ACM SIGIR Forum

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As always, the SIGIR Executive Committee meeting schedules, agendas, and minutes are available publicly1 . We also continue to take suggestions from the community for agenda items for ourmeetings2 .
Best regards,
Ben Carterette
Chair, ACM SIGIR Executive Committee

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

ACM SIGIR Forum

2Vol. 55 No. 1 - June 2021