FROM THE CHAIR. . .

Greetings SIGIR members and friends. Since the publication of the June 2018 issue of SIGIRForum, the SIGIR Executive Committee and volunteers have continued to advance initiatives togrow our community and keep it strong. The Executive Committee has entered into its last yearof service, which will end at SIGIR 2019. Elections for new officers will be held early next year.
Being a member of the Executive Committee is a great way to have a lasting impact on theorganization, and help steer efforts to maintain and build community. Anyone wishing to run foroffice should contact Alistair Moffat (ammoffat@unimelb.edu.au).
We had another large, and exceptionally well-ran, annual meeting in July on the campus of
the University of Michigan, which was organized by Kevyn Collins-Thompson and Qiaozhu Mei.
SIGIR 2018 featured many innovations, strong technical and social programs, and perhaps themost spectacular program booklet ever seen at a SIGIR conference (thanks to Brand and CreativeChair, Esther Eickhoff!). Thanks to the entire SIGIR 2018 organizing team for hosting such asuccessful conference!
A number of awards were presented at SIGIR 2018. Prof. Kalervo Järvelin was presented
with the Gerard Salton Award, which is the highest honor given by SIGIR to recognize significant,sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval. Prof. Järvelin wasrecognized for his contributions in the areas of information retrieval and seeking, interactive andtask-based retrieval, and evaluation metrics and models. His contributions include one of the mostwidely used evaluation measures in information retrieval, multiple insights on information seeking
tasks in real-world contexts, and the creation and use of searcher simulations to better understandsearch behaviors, and to evaluate systems. His ability to integrate research in retrieval algorithms,models and evaluation, with research in information seeking and context, reflects the breadth of
his scholarly influence. We congratulate Prof. Järvelin on this well-deserved recognition! The
next Salton Award will be presented at SIGIR 2021.
A number of conference papers were recognized as well. This year’s SIGIR Best Paper Award
went to:Should I Follow the Crowd? A Probabilistic Analysis of the Effectivenessof Popularity in Recommender Systems by Rocı́o Cañamares and PabloCastells.
This year’s SIGIR Best Short Paper Award went to:
Cross Domain Regularization for Neural Ranking Models using Adversarial
Learning by Daniel Cohen, Bhaskar Mitra, Katja Hofmann, and Bruce
Croft.
In addition to this short paper, the awards committee recognized another short paper with anhonorable mention:
Towards Designing Better Session Search Evaluation Metrics by Mengyang
Liu, Yiqun Liu, Jiaxin Mao, Cheng Luo, and Shaoping Ma.
Finally, the SIGIR Test of Time Award went to:
Improving Web Search Ranking by Incorporating User Behavior Information by Eugene Agichtein, Eric Brill, and Susan Dumais.
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This paper was published at SIGIR 2006. The selection committee also recognized three otherpapers from SIGIR 2006 with honorable mentions:Learning User Interaction Models for Predicting Web Search Result Preferences by Eugene Agichtein, Eric Brill, Susan Dumais, and Robert Ragno.
Formal Models for Expert Finding in Enterprise Corpora by KrisztianBalog, Leif Azzopardi, and Maarten de Rijke.
LDA-based Document Models for Ad-hoc Retrieval by Xing Wei and W.
Bruce Croft.
Future SIGIR conferences will take us to France, China and Canada: Next year’s SIGIR
conference will take place in Paris, France; SIGIR 2020 will take place in Xi’an, China; and SIGIR
2021 will take place in Montreal, Quebec. At the business meeting, three groups made informal
bids to host SIGIR 2022, which will take place in the Europe/Africa region. The location of thisconference will be announced at SIGIR 2019. We also look forward to enjoying informal bids tohost SIGIR 2023 by those in the Asia/Australia region. If this opportunity interests you, pleaseemail me.
One of the SIGIR Executive Committee’s biggest accomplishments this year is AFIRM: ACM
SIGIR/SIGKDD Africa Summer School on Machine Learning for Data Mining and Search, which
will be held on January 14-18, 2019 in Cape Town, South Africa. The idea for this initiative
grew from a discussion at the first Diversity and Inclusion Luncheon which was held at last year’s
SIGIR Conference in Tokyo, Japan, and also a desire to collaborate with closely aligned SIGs. The
mission of AFIRM is to enable students to learn about modern research challenges and methods
in information retrieval and data mining; to stimulate scientific research and collaboration in thesefields; and to grow a community of researchers, students, and industry professionals working on
information retrieval and data mining across Africa with collaborations all around the world. The
summer school will accommodate up to 50 students, and will feature lectures, labs, and keynotes
by top researchers from around the world. This tremendous effort has been led by Ben Carteretteand Hussein Suleman, who are general chairs, and Doug Oard, who is the program committee
chair. To learn more about AFIRM visit: http://sigir.org/afirm2019/. The next issue ofSIGIR Forum will provide a report about this event.
Additional efforts in the area of diversity and inclusion include hosting the second annualDiversity, Equity and Inclusion Luncheon at SIGIR 2018, where the lunch program focused onname bias. We have created two new volunteer positions, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion CoChairs, and have plans to start a Diversity Scholars program to support individuals’ travel toone of our co-sponsored conferences. We continued our strong support of students, awarding
approximately $218,000 in student travel scholarships last year. We also hosted the SIGIR StudentLunch, and the SIGIR Student Party, which continue to be popular events at the SIGIR conference.
We provided financial support to CRA-W and also supported the efforts of the Women in IRgroup, who hosted a session at the SIGIR conference about mentoring women in IR.
Community members continue to create local opportunities to increase participation in SIGIR.
Following the successful SIGIR 2017 in Tokyo, the SIGIR Tokyo chapter was formed. Thanks
to Hideo Joho, Tetsuya Sakai and Masaharu Yoshioka, who serve as officers. In addition to thisACM SIGIR Forum

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chapter, a SIGIR Beijing chapter has also been formed; officers include Yiqun Liu, Jiafeng Guoand Zhicheng Dou. The Friends of SIGIR program provided approximately $42,000 to support
local IR events, including workshops, summer and autumn schools, and larger events such as
CLEP, ADCS and FIRE.
Another significant initiative the SIGIR Executive Committee and volunteers will tackle thisyear is a redesign/development of the SIGIR website. This will include creating a number ofassets that can be used by those hosting the SIGIR, ICTIR and CHIIR conferences, as well as
workflows and guidelines for conference webmasters. The redesign will also include a complete
overhaul of the front-end and back-end architecture that will allow volunteers to more easily build
conference websites, and that will create a more secure and stable platform. The informationarchitecture of the site will also be improved, including increasing the accessibility of online assets
such as materials in the SIGIR museum, and recent conference papers, which are available throughACM’s Open Table-of-Contents program.
An issue that has been mentioned before, but is worth mentioning again is ACM’s Policy
Against Harassment at ACM Activities, which can be found at http://sigir.org/conferences/conference-code-of-conduct/. This policy outlines expected behavior, as well as unacceptablebehavior including abuse, discriminatory harassment, and sexual harassment. This policy provides
guidance on how to report unacceptable behavior and information about how grievances will beaddressed. It is everyone’s responsibility to familiarize themselves with this policy, and to create
and maintain a harassment-free atmosphere at SIGIR-sponsored conferences and events.
The SIGIR Executive Committee recently made the decision to end the print publication ofSIGIR Forum. This issue has come-up repeatedly in the past, and members asked us to discuss
this issue once again at this year’s business meeting. After discussion, there was a vote, and nearly
everyone at the business meeting was in favor of stopping the print issue. Thus, starting with theJune 2019 issue, SIGIR Forum will only be available electronically. It will still be freely available
at the SIGIR website and also available in the ACM Digital Library.
I want to thank other members of the SIGIR Executive Committee for working so hard thispast year to implement our new programs: Jaap Kamps (Vice Chair), Emine Yilmaz (Secretary), Ben Carterette (Treasurer) and Charlie Clarke (Past Chair). I also want to recognize
all of our volunteers who continue to add value for members: Jaime Arguello, Student TravelAwards Chair, Laura Dietz, Student Affairs Chair, Falk Scholer, Awards Chair, Craig Macdonald, June Forum editor, Claudia Hauff, December Forum editor, and Nattiya Kanhabuaand Guido Zuccon, Information Co-Directors. I would also like to recognize our conference
liaisons: Susan Dumais (WSDM), Jimmy Lin (CIKM) and Edie Rasmussen (JCDL), and
our Asia/Pacific Regional Representative, Tetsuya Sakai. Finally, I would like to thank Nicola
Ferro, who is leading a task-force to develop implementation procedures for the ACM Badging
program.
The SIGIR Student Liaisons, who did an excellent job in the inaugural year of the program,should also be recognized: Mohammad Aliannejadi (Universit della Svizzera italiana (USI),Lugano, Switzerland); Maram Hasanain (Qatar University, Qatar); Jiaxin Mao (TsinghuaUniversity, Beijing, China); Jaspreet Singh (L3S Research Center at Leibniz University, Hannover, Germany); Johanne Trippas (RMIT University, Australia) and Hamed Zamani (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA). The student liaisons initiated the SIGIR PhD Buddy
program, helped organize a number of student social events, and provided the SIGIR Execu-ACM SIGIR Forum

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tive Committee with feedback on several issues. Two new student liaisons joined the group thisyear: Souvick Gosh (Rutgers University, USA) and Xiaohui Xie (Tsinghua University, Beijing,China).
It has been a busy and productive year for the SIGIR Executive Committee and all theother SIGIR volunteers, including those who have organized SIGIR sponsored and co-sponsoredconferences. As we continue to move our organization forward, we rely on you, the members ofSIGIR, to send us your feedback and ideas, and volunteer to lead initiatives or activities that you
believe are missing and would make our community more inclusive.
Diane Kelly, SIGIR Chair
Director and Professor
University of Tennessee, USA

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