SIGIR Annual Report:
July 2003 – June 2004
Jamie Callan
Chair, SIGIR
http://www.acm.org/sigir
Introduction
July 2003 – June 2004 was a busy and productive year for SIGIR. The year included transition toa new set of officers and volunteers, the usual range of conferences and services, and some new
initiatives, which are described below. SIGIR was evaluated by the ACM SIG Governing Board(SGB) in September, and deemed viable for another four years. Overall, SIGIR is healthyfinancially, membership is growing slowly, the SIG has an active group of offic ers andvolunteers, and it continues to develop new initiatives and services.
Transitions
The year began with a transition to a new Executive Committee and a new set of volunteers. The
new elected officers are Jamie Callan, Chair; Fabrizio Sebastiani, Vice-Chair; David Lewis,Secretary, and Justin Zobel, Treasurer. Recent SIGIR practice has been to appoint a Regional
Representative to the Executive Committee for major regions that don’t have an electedrepresentative. Noriko Kando was appointed Asian Regional Representative, for a term thatcoincides with the elected members of the Executive Committee. Peter Anick continues as one ofthe two Forum Editors. Ian Ruthven replaces Mark Sanderson as the other Forum Editor. EricBrown continues as SIGIR's Information Officer, primarily responsible for managing the SIGIR
home page (http://www.acm.org/sigir) and mailing list. Raman Chandrasekar was appointed toedit the SIG-IRList electronic newsletter that serves the IR community, replacing MarkSanderson and Stephen Levin. Past Chair Susan Dumais was appointed to Chair the newly
created Awards Committee.
Conferences
SIGIR sponsors, co-sponsors and cooperates with other technical groups on several conferencesand 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 Sixth Annual ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research and Development
in Information Retrieval, SIGIR’03 (http://www.sigir2003.org/) was held in Toronto, Canada
from July 28 – August 1, 2003. Charlie Clarke and Gordon Cormack (University of Waterloo,Canada) served as the General Conference Chairs, and Jamie Callan, David Hawking, and Alan
Smeaton served as Program Co-Chairs. The meeting featured a strong technical program: 46 fullpapers, 51 posters, and 8 demonstrations were presented. Bruce Croft won the triennial SaltonAward; his invited talk was entitled Information Retrieval and Computer Science: An Evolving
Relationship . The Best Paper Award went to Ian Ruthven for his paper Re-examining thepotential effectiveness of interactive query expansion. The Best Student Paper Award went toStefanie Tellex, Boris Katz, Jimmy Lin, Aaron Fernandes, and Gregory Marton for their paper
Quantitative evaluation of passage retrieval algorithms for question answering. In addition, akeynote address was given during the conference, 9 tutoria ls preceded the meeting, and 8workshops on emerging topics and trends followed the meeting. There were 312 attendees for themain conference, and more than 100 each for workshops and tutorials. The conference wassuccessful financially as well, returning more than $36k to SIGIR. Although the conference wassmaller than most North American SIGIR conferences, due to the SARS outbreaks in Toronto
earlier that year, it was a big success. Special thanks and recognition are due Charlie Clarke andGord Cormack for their heroic efforts to keep the conference on-track.
SIGIR offers a Mentoring Program to assist authors who have not previously had a full length
paper accepted to SIGIR. Demand for this service continues to increase, but the number ofmentored papers that were accepted has stayed flat, at about two per year. This is not yet
considered a problem, but it is something the Executive Committee and Mentoring Chairs aremonitoring. We thank Edie Rasmussen, who chaired the mentoring program for SIGIR 2003, andall the mentors for their efforts in broadening the scope and quality of SIGIR papers.
A growing amount of student travel to the SIGIR conference is supported by SIGIR in its budget,by contributions from the 1998 SIGIR conference in Melbourne, and by an IBM student travel
grant. Twenty four students from North America, Europe, Middle East, Australia, and Asia
received support to attend the 2003 meeting. The submissions, attendance and awards all reflect
a strong international and student participation in SIGIR.
To further encourage student participation and growth, SIGIR introduced a Doctoral Forum
program at SIGIR 2004 in which students explore their research interests in a workshop under theguidance of a panel of distinguished researchers. This is a new service; details on how well it
worked will be provided in next year’s annual report.
In September SIGIR received bids from Amsterdam, the Netherlands (led by Wessel Kraaij andArjen de Vries) and Toulouse, France (led by Josiane Mothe) to host SIGIR 2007. Both bids
were very strong, and either site would have been a good choice. Amsterdam was selected.
CIKM.
CIKM'03, the Twelfth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management,
was co-sponsored by SIGIR and SIGMIS and held in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, Nov 2-8,
2003 (http://cikm.org/2003/). Don Kraft served as General Conference Chair, and Ophir Frieder,
Joachim Hammer, Sajda Qureshi, and Len Seligman served as Program Co-Chairs. CIKM has afocus on problems at the intersection of information retrieval, databases and knowledge
management techniques. This year there was good representation of new work on web databases
and search over structured data. The keynote address was provided by Jaime Carbonell (CMU).
There were 59 papers and 18 posters, along with tutorials and workshops. The conference
continues to improve in quality (15% acceptance rate) and provides an important bridge between
the database and information retrieval communities. The conference made a small profit ($1305),
half of which was returned to SIGIR.
JCDL.
The Third Joint ACM/IEEE Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’03) was held in Houston,
Texas, USA from May 27-32 2003 (http://www.rice.edu/jcdl03/). The conference was cosponsored by ACM (SIGIR and SIGWEB) and IEEE (TCDL). The conference is the third
merged DL conference, encompassing what had previously been two separate digital libraryconferences (ACM’s DL conference and IEEE’s ADL conference). We thank the ACM DLSteering Committee (in particular our SIGIR representative, Christine Borgman) for its very hardand careful work in creating a new, richer DL forum for discussions of research, practice, systems
and policy issues surrounding digital libraries. Geneva Henry served as Conference Chair, andCatherine C. Marshall served as Program Chair. The program consisted of 23 full papers, alongwith short papers, panels, demos, posters, tutorials. In addition a diverse set of panels covered avariety of topics including intellectual property, sustainability, accessibility, and integrating
digital and physical collections. The Vannevar Bush Award for Best Paper was presented to:Barbara M. Wildemuth, Gary Marchionini, Meng Yang, Gary Geisle r, Todd Wilkens, Anthony
Hughes and Richard Gruss for How fast is too fast? Evaluating fast forward surrogates for digital
video. This was a successful conference with more than 320 conference attendees. Profitability
is still unknown, due to difficulty closing the books.
The Fourth Joint ACM/IEEE Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL’04) was recently held in
Tucson, Arizona, USA in early June, 2004. Hsinchun Chen, Howard Wactlar, and Ching-chihChen served as General Conference Chairs, and Ee-Peng Lim and Mike Christel were theProgram Chairs. More details of this conference will be available in the next annual report.
In Cooperation
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: CORIA 2004 (COnférence en Recherche Information et Applications), andHLT/NAACL 2004 (Human Language Technology and North American Applied Computational
Linguistics conference). For the coming year, in cooperation agreements have been approved for
AIRS 2004 (Asia Information Retrieval Symposium), AH 2004 (International Conference on
Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-based Systems), CIVR 2004 (International Conference
on Image and Video Retrieval) , ECIR 2005 (European Conference on Information Retrieval), andSPIRE 2005 (String Processing and Information Retrieval).
Publications
The SIGIR Web site is maintained by SIGIR's Information Officer, Eric Brown. It provides
timely information about SIGIR-sponsored conferences, “in cooperation” conferences, and SIGIRactivities, as well as Business Meeting slides, the annual report, and other information about how
SIGIR operates. In addition to providing information about the organization, the SIGIR web site
also hosts the SIGIR Forum and SIG-IRList sites.
The SIGIR Forum is co-edited by Peter Anick and Ian Ruthven. The Forum is published threetimes a year. The issues were renamed to Special, December, and June this year, to remove ahemispheric bias and to clarify when they are published. The Special issue is the SIGIR
Proceedings; the December and June issues cover IR conferences, workshops and symposia, as
well as in depth essays based on the Salton Award Lecture and keynote addresses, and current
research trends. The Forum appears both online (http://www.acm.org/sigir/forum/) and in paper.
The SIG-IRList is a SIGIR-sponsored electronic newsletter, edited by Raman Chandrasekar(http://www.acm.org/sigir/sigirlist/). The SIG-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 forparticipation, and project announcements.
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
are available electronically in the ACM Digital Library. The first 25 years of SIGIR Proceedings
and Forum are also available in the 25th Anniversary SIGIR CD. In addition, all issues of theSIGIR Forum from 1974 to the present have been digitized. We are still missing some copies ofthe Forum from 1965-1972. If you have copies, please contact us (sigir-ec@acm.org).
Membership and Membership Programs
Interest in information retrieval is increasing. SIGIR-sponsored conferences are seeing solid
attendance, and SIGIR membership is slowly growing, from 950 in May 2001 to 1072 in May
2002, 1192 in May 2003, and 1301 in June 2004, all of which are good signs. Some newmembership services have been developed to attract new members and to provide better service
to our continuing members. We continue to look for other ways to enhance our membershipbenefits, including a more active publicity campaign, offering new online membership services,and developing stronger ties with related organizations including more joint meetings.
Three years ago SIGIR started a Member Value Plus (MVP) program called the Proceedings
Package. The package offers the basic benefits of SIGIR membership, including the SIGIR
Forum and SIGIR Proceedings. In addition the conference proceedings from the two cosponsored meetings, three ACM conferences, CIKM and JCDL are included. It’s a great value
and an easy way to get all the SIGIR-sponsored conference proceedings. The number ofmembers taking advantage of the MVP program has increased steadily from its inception (31 inthe first year to 136 this year). An analysis at the end of the year indicates that SIGIR is losing
money on this program, primarily because the CIKM conference proceedings are far more
expensive than anticipated, so the cost of this program will increase next year.
Next year SIGIR will offer a new MVP program. This optional membership package adds theDigital Symposium Collection (DiSC) DVD ROM to the usual SIGIR membership benefits. TheDiSC DVD includes the SIGIR, CIKM, and JCDL conference proceedings, as well as theproceedings and newsletters from a wide range of conferences and SIGs with IR- and DB-relatedinterests. This package is cheaper and more comprehensive than the Proceedings Package, so we
expect it to be popular, and perhaps eventually to replace the Proceedings Package.
AwardsAn Awards Committee was created this year, chaired by Past SIGIR Chair Susan Dumais, toidentify distinguished members of the IR community that are eligible for ACM awards. The IR
community has not historically been award-oriented, and it is not our goal to change this tradition
in a major way. However, the Executive Committee believes that some recognition of theintellectual leaders of the IR community is both deserved and healthy for the field. One happy
result of this effort is that C.J. “Keith” van Rijsbergen was named an ACM Fellow this year, inrecognition of significant service and leadership to the field of IR.
Note that to be eligible for an ACM award, one must be a member of ACM, usually for several(e.g., five) years. Some prominent members of the IR field don’t meet this requirement, thus
their contributions must be recognized in other ways.
The Awards Committee will operate for two years under Sue’s guidance. After the second year
the awards effort will be evaluated to determine whether it is worth continuing.
Summary
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 rele vance toindustrial 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.