FROM THE CHAIRGreetings SIGIR members and friends! This is an exciting year for SIGIR as we mark the 40thanniversary of the SIGIR Conference. Did you know that SIGIR is actually tied for the second oldest
ACM SIG1? SIGIR, the organization, was founded in 1963, held its first co-sponsored meeting in1971, and its first conference in 1978. At this year’s SIGIR Conference in Tokyo, Japan, there will beseveral events to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Conference, including recognition of thepre-2002 Test of Time paper award recipients. We have also published a special issue of the SIGIR
Forum to mark the 40th anniversary of the conference, and to pay homage to these papers, whichdocument the history and evolution of IR research and practice as evidenced through the conference
proceedings. We hope this special issue will become a precious part of your collection.
Meanwhile, this issue contains the recent Test of Time award paper – as announced at SIGIR 2016,
the award went to Thorsten Joachims, Laura Granka, Bing Pan, Helene Hembrooke and Geri Gay for
their SIGIR 2005 paper “Accurately Interpreting Clickthrough Data as Implicit Feedback”. Whilethe use of clickthrough data is standard practice in most contemporary IR systems, this paper waspublished at a time when researchers were first beginning to explore the usefulness of it, especially asrelevance feedback. In this research, Joachims and colleagues not only explored if clickthrough data
could be used as relevance feedback, but also in what circumstances. In particular, they discoveredthat clickthrough data should more accurately be understood as relative, rather than absolute,relevance judgments.
Since our annual conference last year in Pisa, Italy, the SIGIR Executive Committee and Volunteers
have been busy implementing and investigating many of the initiatives and issues we discussed
during the business meeting. Below is a summary of our major activities.
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Developed and instituted fiscal policies that should allow organizers of the SIGIR
Conference, CHIIR and ICTIR to reduce the cost of conference registration for SIGIRmembers.
Finalized the SIGIR Student Affairs Chair position description. The major role of theSIGIR Student Affairs Chair is to make sure that every student attendee is improving her orhis network within the community; essentially, the Student Affairs Chair will make sure thatno student is left behind! The SIGIR Student Affairs Chair will organize special events,
such as the SIGIR student events, improve connections among students (i.e., the leaders of thefuture) and will encourage senior community members from academia and industry to talk tostudents about their needs, research, and career goals. Laura Dietz serves as the inauguralStudent Affairs Chair.
Finalized the SIGIR Student Liaison position description. This included creating an
appointment and application procedure for identifying Student Liaisons. We solicited
applications and selected the inaugural class of liaisons, who will be announced at this year’s
SIGIR Conference. The role of Student Liaisons is to help ensure that student attendees are
introduced and tightly knit into our community, enacting a “no student left behind” mission.
Student Liaisons will work with the Student Affairs Chair to design student events andluncheons, and identify other opportunities for student engagement. Student Liaisons will also
serve as the voice of students, providing feedback about issues of concern to students.

http://historywiki.acm.org/sigs/Main_Page

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Co-sponsored the upcoming 50 years of the ACM Turing Award Celebration, which willtake place on June 23-24. We are sending 10 SIGIR student members to this event.
Nominated over ten early-career IR researchers for the ACM Future of Computing
Academy. In addition to these nominations, we also nominated several members for other
ACM awards and honors.
Created and instituted a SIGIR Best Short Paper Award, which will be given at this year’s
SIGIR conference. We also sponsored the CHIIR Best Paper Award, and plan to complete
paperwork to make the best paper award for this conference, as well as ICTIR, official ACM
SIGIR Awards.
Outlined an Industry Liaison program to provide the SIGIR Executive Committee with anindustry perspective on SIGIR as an organization and conference, and IR research more
broadly; to assist with promoting SIGIR within industries and forging stronger connections;and to help plan programming.
Co-sponsored the CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop, which took place April 7-8 in
Washington, D.C., and sent a SIGIR volunteer to staff a booth and advertise SIGIR.
Formalized procedures for giving authors of ACM Transactions on Information Systems(TOIS) papers the opportunity to orally present their work at the SIGIR, CHIIR or ICTIR
conferences, in collaboration with TOIS editor, Maarten de Rijke (seehttp://sigir.org/conferences/tois-presentation/).
Increased the budget allocation for the Friends of SIGIR program, reviewed allocation
policies and drafted new online application form.
Created a Conference Code of Conduct Anti-Harassment Policy (seehttp://sigir.org/conferences/conference-code-of-conduct/).

In addition to these accomplishments, we also have several new initiatives that are underway.
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At this year’s SIGIR Conference, we will host a Diversity and Inclusions Luncheon onWednesday, August 9th. The purpose of this event is to provide a forum for education anddiscussion of issues related to diversity and inclusion in the SIGIR community. The scope ofdiversity and inclusion encompasses many things including particular characteristics thatpeople possess, as well as research diversity and inclusion with respect to topics, approachesand audiences. We hope this event will inaugurate a series of programs to address diversity
and inclusion in the community.
We will develop procedures to implement ACM artifact review and badging with respect torepeatability, replicability and reproducibility of research (seehttps://www.acm.org/publications/policies/artifact-review-badging).
Evaluation and update of the SIGIR website’s information architecture.
Evaluation and update/creation of SIGIR promotional materials.

With respect to our conference calendar: JCDL will be held June 19-23 in Toronto, Canada; ICTIR
will be held October 1-4 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands; CIKM will be held November 6-10 inSingapore; WSDM will be held February 6-8, 2018 in Los Angeles, California, USA; and CHIIR willbe held March 11-15, 2018 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA.

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Please feel free to send us any issues you’d like us to consider, or any feedback you have about ourinitiatives and accomplishments. We hope to see you in a few months at this year’s SIGIR
Conference in Tokyo, Japan!
Diane Kelly
Chair of SIGIR Executive Committee
chair_SIGIR@acm.org

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