ANNUAL REPORT for SIGIR, July 2000 - June 2001
http://www.acm.org/sigir
Submitted by: Susan Dumais, Chair SIGIR--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------SIGIR again had a busy and fruitful year in 2000-2001, 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 regionalrepresentatives. David replaces Peter Schaeuble (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) who had served as
the European representative for several years. We thank Peter for his hard work. SIGIR'sInformation Officer, Eric Brown (IBM, USA) does a fine job in maintaining and expanding theSIGIR home page (http://www.acm.org/sigir). Eric recently replaced Charles Viles (University ofNorth Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA) who had served as SIGIR’s Information Officer for severalyears. We thank Charlie for many years of hard work and enthusiasm in moving SIGIR’sresources to the web.
SIGIR sponsors, co-sponsors and cooperates with other technical groups on several conferences
and workshops during the year. The main conference this year was the Twenty Third Annual
ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval(SIGIR). http://sigir2000.aueb.gr. The 2000 meeting was held in Athens (Greece). EmmanuelYannakoudakis (Athens University) served as the General Conference Chair, and Nick Belkin,Peter Ingwersen and Mun-Kew Leong served as Program Co-Chairs. This was a successful
meeting with 38 full papers, 30 posters, and 7 demonstrations were presented. There was astrong program of 8 tutorials preceding the meeting, and a varied workshop program following themeeting. A growing amount of student travel to SIGIR is supported by a SIGIR budget item andby contributions from the 1998 conference in Melbourne. Fourteen students from North America,
South America, Europe, Middle East and Asia received support to attend the 2000 meeting. Theawards committee selected two submissions for awards -- Best Paper Award: Kalervo Jarvelinand Janna Kekalainen, "IR evaluation methods for retrieving highly relevant documents”, andBest Student Paper Award: Ilmerio Reis da Silva, Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Pavel Calado, Sdleno
Moura and Nivio Ziviani, "Link-based and content-based evidential information in a belief networkmorel". The Local Conference Organizing Committee also recognized Noam Slonim for bestpresentation. The submissions, attendance and awards all reflect a strong international andstudent participation in SIGIR. In addition to the strong technical program, EmmanuelYannakoudakis and his colleagues put together a fine social program including a banquet by thesea, a new IR Conference Trophy to be passed from chair to chair, all while dealing with achange in location resulting from earthquake damage to the original location. We thankEmmanuel, Athens University of Economics and Business, the British Computer Society-IRSG
and the Greek Computer Society for their hard work and support in putting together a successful
SIGIR conference.
During the past year the Salton Award Committee selected the sixth recipient of the Gerard
Salton Award. This award is SIGIR’s highest technical award and honors significant, sustained
and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval. The award was first presented in1983 (to Gerard Salton) and has been presented every three years starting in 1988. The 2000
recipient is Stephen Robertson (Microsoft Research Ltd.). Stephen was recognized for "Thirty
years of significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval. Of
special importance are the theoretical and empirical contributions to the development, refinement,and evaluation of probabilistic models of information retrieval.“
http://www.sigir.org/awards/awards.html. Stephen delivered a thought-provoking Salton Award

Lecture at the SIGIR’2000 Annual Meeting. “On theoretical argument in information retrieval”, thefull text of his talk, is published in the SIGIR Forum, Spring 2000, 34(1).
SIGIR is also involved in the sponsorship of two other ACM conferences, CIKM and JCDL.
CIKM'00, the Ninth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, wasco-sponsored by SIGIR (40%), SIGMIS (40%), and SIGMIS (20%) (http://www.cikm.org/2000).
The 2000 meeting was held in McLean, VA. Susan Gauch served as General Conference Chair,and Jamie Callan and Elke Rundensteiner served as Program Co-Chairs. CIKM has a strong
focus on databases in combination with information retrieval and management techniques. Thisyear there was good representation of work on web databases and data warehousing techniques.
Keynote addresses by Erik Thomsen (Dimensional System), Ed Fox (U Virginia), and a panel onIndustry Perspectives on Information and Knowledge Management focused on these newdirections. There were 54 papers, 4 tutorials, and 3 workshops. The conference continues toimprove in quality and provide a bridge between the database and information retrieval
communities.
The First Joint ACM/IEEE Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’01) was held in Roanoke, VA at
the end of June (http://www.jcdl.org/). Ed Fox served as Conference Chair, with Christine
Borgman serving as Program Chair. This year the conference was co-sponsored by ACM (SIGIRand SIGWEB) and IEEE (TCDL), and represents the merging of what had previously been twoseparate digital library conferences (ACM’s DL conference and IEEE’s ADL conference). For thelast several years, the ACM DL Steering Committee worked hard to merge of ACM DL and IEEE
ADL conferences, and final merger documents were approved by both ACM and IEEE in 2000.
The first meeting signals the broad appeal of the joint conference, capitalizing on its strengths inresearch, practice, systems and policy issues surrounding digital libraries. We thank the ACM DLSteering Committee (in particular our SIGIR representative, Nick Belkin) for its very hard andcareful work in creating a new, richer DL forum. SIGIR and SIGWEB will continue to be equal cosponsors of the series, along with IEEE’s technical committee on digital libraries (TCDL). Therewas a strong program of 40 full papers, 36 short papers, 9 panels, 10 demos, 16 posters, 6tutorials, and 3 workshops plust the NSF DLI PI meeting. The Vannevar Bush Award for BestPaper was presented to: Gregry Crane, Clifford Wulfman and David Smith for their paper"Building a hypertextual digital library in the humanities: A case study on London". Honorable
mention goes to Catherine Marshall, Morgan Price, Gene Golovchinsky and Bill Schilit for theirpaper “Designing e-books for legal education”. Because the conference was just recentlycompleted, there are no final attendance or financial figures available yet, but by informal
accounts it was a successful DL conference.
In addition the three ACM conferences that SIGIR sponsors, we “cooperate” with several otherIR-related conferences but have no financial stake in them. These conferences compliment thetechnical focus of our own conferences, and include work on hypertext, multimedia, Asianlanguages, etc. As a cooperating society, SIGIR members obtained reduced registration fees atthese conferences. This year, SIGIR had “in cooperation” agreements with: ACM:HT’00(Hypertext), ACM:MM’00 (MultiMedia), ACM:CUU’00 (Conference on Universal Usability),
RCDL’2000 (Russian Conference on Digital Libraries), RIAO 2000 (Recherche d’Informations
Assistee par Ordinateur), IRAL’00 (IR with Asian Languages), and AH’00 (InternationalConference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-based Systems).
SIGIR's Information Officer, Eric Brown (IBM, USA), 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.
The SIGIR Web site has become an important resource for IR researchers and practitioners, andwe anticipate that its influence will continue to grow. This has become an important resource forIR researchers and practitioners, and we anticipate that its influence will continue to grow. Inaddition to providing information about the organization, the SIGIR web site also host the SIGIR
Forum and SIG-IRList sites.
Thanks again are due to the editors of SIGIR Forum, Mark Sanderson and Fazli Can, who have

successfully developed this journal into both a news forum and an important scientific forum. TheForum presents new research, reflections like the Salton Award Lecture, and coverage of IR
conferences, workshops and symposia. The Forum appears both online(http://www.acm.org/sigir/forum/contents.html) and in paper. The Online Forum provides a more
timely publication avenue and we look toward developing this as a more interactive forum for IRinformation.
This year, SIGIR started sponsoring an electronic newsletter, SIG-IRList(http://www.acm.org/sigir/sigirlist/). This provides a regular newsletter of IR information andnicely 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 (UnivSheffield) for their work in starting and providing ongoing energy for this important source ofcurrent awareness about a wide range of topics and opportunities in IR.
SIGIR started a Member Value Plus (MVP) program this year. The package includes the basic
benefits of SIGIR membership and in addition conference proceedings from the three ACM
conferences sponsored by SIGIR (SIGIR, CIKM and JCDL) at cost.
SIGIR has been active in digitizing content for inclusion in the ACM Digital Library and theACM:SIGMOD Anthology. The Proceedings of all SIGIR conference from 1978 to present areavailable electronically (currently only in the Anthology, but soon in the DL). In addition, allissues of the SIGIR Forum from 1974 to the present have been digitized. This collection ofmaterials forms a wonderful resource for new researchers in the field. We would like to thankseveral 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.
Although interest in information retrieval is growing and SIGIR-sponsored conferences are seeing
steadily increasing attendance, membership continues to slowly decline. Some new membershipservices have been developed to help address this issue and to provide better service to ourcontinuing members. We developed the Membership Value Plus (MVP) options. SIGIRsponsored conference proceedings will soon be available on the SIGMOD Anthology CDs. Thishas the two fold advantage of providing added visibility for IR research, and providing databaserelated content to our members at low cost. We continue to look for other ways to enhance ourmembership, including a more active publicity campaign, offering new online membershipservices, and developing stronger ties with related organizations including more joint meetings.
Since our problem is common to many ACM SIGs, we also look to them for collaboration inaddressing this issue.
SIGIR had a productive and successful year, with important intellectual and social contributions.
Our conferences have been remarkably successful in all senses (with especially strong technicalcontent and good international participation), and our financial situation is quite healthy. We willcontinue 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 events.