--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ANNUAL REPORT for SIGIR, July 2002 - June 2003
http://www.acm.org/sigir
Submitted by: Susan Dumais and Jamie Callan, Outgoing and Incoming Chairs SIGIR--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------SIGIR had a busy and fruitful year in 2002-2003, sponsoring or co-sponsoring several successful
conferences, and offering new member services. July 1 marks a changing of the officers. Theoutgoing officers are: Susan Dumais, Chair; Susan Gauch, Vice-Chair; Liz Liddy, Secretary, andJamie Callan, Treasurer. The incoming officers are: Jamie Callan, Chair; Fabrizio Sebastiani,Vice-Chair; David Lewis, Secretary, and Justin Zobel, Treasurer. In our continuing effort to make
SIGIR a truly international organization, two regional representatives are appointed by theexecutive committee and serve as part of the SIGIR-EC. The current regional representatives
are Ross Wilkinson (CSIRO, Australia) and David Harper (The Robert Gordon University, UK).
SIGIR's Information Officer, Eric Brown (IBM, USA) is responsible for SIGIR’s electronicpresence, most notably the SIGIR home page (http://www.acm.org/sigir). The SIGIR Forum
Editors, Mark Sanderson and Peter Anick, round out the SIGIR team.
Conferences:SIGIR sponsors, co-sponsors and cooperates with other technical groups on several conferences
and workshops during the year. The main conference is the annual SIGIR meeting. We also cosponsor two other ACM conferences, CIKM and JCDL.
SIGIR.
The Twenty Fifth Annual ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development inInformation Retrieval, SIGIR’02 (http://www.info.uta.fi/sigir2002/) was held in Tampere, Finlandfrom Aug 11-15. Kalervo Järvelin (University of Tampere, Finland) served as the General
Conference Chair, and Micheline Beaulieu, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Sung Hyon Myaeng served asProgram Co-Chairs. The meeting featured a strong technical program: 44 full papers, 48 posters,
and 13 demonstrations were presented. In addition, 2 keynote addresses were given during theconference, 8 tutorials preceded the meeting, and 6 workshops on emerging topics and trends
followed the meeting. There were 337 attendees for the main conference, and more than 100
each for workshops and tutorials. The conference was successful financially as well, returning$30k to SIGIR. The awards committee selected submissions for awards -- The Best Paper
Award went to Yi Zhang, Jamie Callan, and Thomas Minka (CMU) for their paper Novelty andRedundancy Detection in Adaptive Filtering. The lead author on this paper was a student, so
there was no Best Student Paper Award this year.
SIGIR offers a Mentoring Program to assist authors who have not previously had a full length
paper accepted to SIGIR. Seventeen papers were submitted for mentorship, and the program
was viewed as a success by both mentors and mentee. Two mentored papers were accepted,
and the program was continued in 2003. We thank Peter Anick, who chaired the mentoring
program, and all the mentors for their efforts in broadening the scope and quality of SIGIRpapers. A growing amount of student travel to SIGIR is supported by SIGIR in its budget, bycontributions from the 1998 SIGIR conference in Melbourne, and by an IBM student travel grant.
Twenty six students from North America, South America, Europe, Middle East and Asia received
support to attend the 2002 meeting. The submissions, attendance and awards all reflect a strong
international and student participation in SIGIR. To further encourage student participation andgrowth, SIGIR will introduce a Doctoral Forum program next year in which students explore theirresearch interests in a workshop under the guidance of a panel of distinguished researchers.
thThe SIGIR’02 meeting marked the 25 Annual SIGIR Meeting. To honor that occasion weprepared CDs of the 25 years of proceedings. The CDs were distributed to all conference
attendees and all SIGIR members. The annual business meeting included a pictorial history of

SIGIR through the years. The first SIGIR conference was held in Rochester, NY USA chaired byRobert Datolla, the second conference in Dallas, TX USA chaired by Robert Korfhag, and thethird conference moved across the Atlantic to Cambridge, UK chaired by Keith van Rijsbergen.
The Cambridge conference started the tradition of alternating between a North American andnon-North American location, which continues today. The avid SIGIR attendee would haveaccumulated 115,359 frequent flier miles (185,697km) just going from one conference location tothe next. Keith van Rijsbergen’s Invited Address, Landmarks in Information Retrieval: TheMessage Out of the Bottle, reflected on key accomplishments and trends during the 25+ years ofSIGIR. Alan Smeaton and colleagues prepared a bibliometric analysis of the 850+ papers and1110+ authors, showing topical trends as well as co-authorship trends. Bruce Croft is the author
with the most papers and most collaborators, and Chris Buckley has the shortest average path
length to all other authors, earning him SIGIR’s Christopher Lee Award. Details of Alan’spresentation can be found at: http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/SIGIR/index.html
SIGIR'02 was also the first conference outside of North America to be sponsored by ACM SIGIR.
Prior to SIGIR'02 all conferences outside of North America were sponsored by local institutions,and profits (or losses) remained in the region; ACM SIGIR survived primarily on the profits from
North American conferences. SIGIR'02 was sponsored by ACM SIGIR (50%) and the Universityof Tampere (50%). The financial success of SIGIR'02 allowed us to significantly increase student
travel support awards for SIGIR'03. The 50/50 sponsorship model will be used again for
SIGIR'04 in Sheffield, UK. After SIGIR'04 the Executive Committee and its advisors willreevaluate financing methods for conferences outside the North America.
CIKM.
CIKM'02, the Eleventh International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management,
was co-sponsored by SIGIR and SIGMIS and held in McLean, VA USA, Nov 4-9, 2002
(http://cikm.org/2002/). Charles Nicholas served as General Conference Chair, and David
Grossman, Konstantinos Kalpakis, Sajda Qureshi and Han van Dissel served as Program CoChairs. CIKM has a focus on problems at the intersection of information retrieval, databases andknowledge management techniques. This year there was good representation of new work on
web databases and search over structured data. Keynote addresses by Ophir Frieder (IIT),
Christos Faloutsos (CMU) and Maria Zemankova (NSF) focused on scalable information retrieval
systems and new directions in data mining and knowledge management. There were 81 papers
and 17 posters, along with tutorials and workshops. Long-standing workshops on geographicalinformation systems, document engineering, OLAP and web data management, occurredfollowing the conference. The conference continues to improve in quality and provide a bridge
between the database and information retrieval communities. The conference made a small
profit, half of which ($7,500) was returned to SIGIR.
JCDL.
The Second Joint ACM/IEEE Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’02) was held in Portland, OR
USA from July 14-18 2001 (http://www.jcdl.info/jcdl02/). The conference was co-sponsored byACM (SIGIR and SIGWEB) and IEEE (TCDL). The conference is the second merged DL
conference, encompassing what had previously been two separate digital library conferences(ACM’s DL conference and IEEE’s ADL conference). The merged conference has proved very
successful and we will continue this format moving forward. We thank the ACM DL Steering
Committee (in particular our SIGIR representative, Nick Belkin) for its very hard and careful workin creating a new, richer DL forum for discussions of research, practice, systems and policy
issues surrounding digital libraries. William Hersh served as Conference Chair for theconference, and Gary Marchionini served as Program Chair. There was a strong program of 33
full papers, along with short papers, panels, demos, posters, tutorials. In addition a diverse set ofpanels covered a variety of topics including digital preservation, vertical applications and theimportance of metadata. The Vannevar Bush Award for Best Paper was presented to: Barbara
M. Wildemuth, Gary Marchionini, Meng Yang, Gary Geisler, Todd Wilkens, Anthony Hughes andRichard Gruss for How fast is too fast? Evaluating fast forward surrogates for digital video. Thiswas a very successful conference with more than 450 conference attendees, and more than 150

involved in tutorials and workshops. A small profit was split among the sponsoring organizations,returning about $8100 to SIGIR.
The Third Joint ACM/IEEE Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’03) was recently held in
Houston, TX USA at the end of May. Geneva Henry was the general Conference Chair, andCatherine Marshall was the Program Chair. More details of this conference will be available in
the next annual report.
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, adaptivesystems, etc. As a cooperating society, SIGIR members obtained reduced registration fees andother member benefits at these conferences. This past year, SIGIR had “in cooperation”
agreements with: AH’02 (International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Webbased Systems), CIA’02 (Collaborative Information Agents), and ASIS&T’02 (American Society
for Information Science and Technology). We are working on a cooperation agreement with thenew Human Language Technology and Applied Computational Linguistics Conference HLTNAACL’03.
Other Activities - Publications, Member Programs:
SIGIR's Information Officer, Eric Brown, 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, and weanticipate that its influence will continue to grow. In addition to providing information about theorganization, the SIGIR web site also hosts the SIGIR Forum and SIG-IRList sites.
The SIGIR Forum is co-edited by Mark Sanderson and Peter Anick. The Forum is publishedthree times a year. The summer issue is the SIGIR Proceedings, and the Spring and Fall issues
cover IR conferences, workshops and symposia, as well as in depth essays based on the SaltonAward Lecture and keynote addresses, and current research trends. The Forum appears bothonline (http://www.acm.org/sigir/forum/) 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. Mark and Peter worked hard this year to revitalize the Forum as an outlet for new
developments in IR. The Fall 2002 Forum, for example, included four original articles on Web
search, a bibliometric analysis of the first 25 years of SIGIR papers, and the JCDL keynote
address. In addition, this issue included ten workshop reports, and mark the first time wepublished dissertation abstracts. We encourage new PhDs to take part in this new outlet for theirdissertation work. Mark Sanderson will be stepping down as co-editor, so he can devote his fullenergies as Conference Chair for SIGIR’04. If you are interested in working on the Forum, let us
know (sigir-ec@acm.org).
The SIG-IRList is a SIGIR-sponsored electronic newsletter, (http://www.acm.org/sigir/sigirlist/).
The IRList provides a regular newsletter of IR information and nicely compliments the archival
publication SIGIR Forum. The SIG-IRList contains job announcements, notices of publications,conferences, workshops, calls for participation, and project announcements. Special thanks are
due to Stephen Levin and Mark Sanderson (Univ. of Sheffield) for their work in editing andarchiving this important source of current awareness about a wide range of topics andopportunities in IR.
SIGIR started a Member Value Plus (MVP) program two years ago. The package offers the basic
benefits of SIGIR membership, including the SIGIR Forum and SIGIR Proceedings. In addition
the conference proceedings from the two co-sponsored meetings, three ACM conferences, CIKM
and JCDL are included. It’s a great value and an easy way to get all the SIGIR-sponsoredconference proceedings. The number of members taking advantage of the MVP program has
increased steadily from its inception (31 first year, 84 last year, 117 this year). For more

information on joining the SIGIR MVP program, see http://www.acm.org/sigir .
SIGIR has been active in digitizing content so member can easily access materials from theSIGIR Proceedings and Forum. The Proceedings of all SIGIR conference from 1978 to present
thare available electronically in the ACM Digital Library. They are also available in the 25
Anniversary SIGIR CD. In addition, all issues of the SIGIR Forum from 1974 to the present havebeen digitized. This collection of materials forms a wonderful resource for new researchers in thefield. We would like to thank several of our members who made personal copies of thesematerials 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 19651972. If you have copies, please contact us (sigir-ec@acm.org).
Interest in information retrieval is increasing. SIGIR-sponsored conferences are seeing solidattendance, and SIGIR membership is slowly growing, from 950 in May 2001 to 1072 in May2002, and 1192 in May 2003, all of which are good signs. Some new membership services havebeen developed to attract new members and to provide better service to our continuing members.
We continue to look for other ways to enhance our membership benefits, including a more active
publicity campaign, offering new online membership services, and developing stronger ties withrelated organizations including more joint meetings.
SIGIR had a productive and successful year, with important intellectual and social contributions.
Our conferences have been successful in all senses (with strong technical content and goodinternational participation), and our financial situation is quite healthy. We will continue to workon ways to improve membership benefits, student and international participation, and relevanceto 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 meetings.