SUMMER SCHOOL REPORT

Asian Summer School in Information Access(ASSIA 2013)
http://www.kc.tsukuba.ac.jp/assia2013/
Hideo Joho
University of Tsukuba
hideo@slis.tsukuba.ac.jp
Noriko Kando
National Institute of Informatics
kando@nii.ac.jp
Yohei Seki
University of Tsukuba
yohei@slis.tsukuba.ac.jp

Tetsuya Sakai
Waseda University
tetsuyasakai@acm.org

Shigeo Sugimoto
University of Tsukuba
sugimoto@slis.tsukuba.ac.jp
Abstract

The first Asian Summer School in Information Access (ASSIA 2013) was held between
22nd and 24th June, 2013 in Tsukuba, Japan. The summer school offered 9 lectures inInformation Retrieval, Web Search, and related topics, along with two panel discussions anda poster session. This reports a successful international summer school in Asia attracting a
total of 63 participants from the range of countries in Asia, Europe, and North America.

1

Introduction

The Asian Summer School in Information Access (ASSIA 2013) was held between 22nd and24th June, 2013 in Tsukuba, Japan. Although there has been a series of Information Retrieval(IR) summer school in India (Yahoo! Summer School), this was the first international summer
school for students, faculty members, and industrial researchers in Asian regions to learn basic
and advanced topics in Information Access. IR summer schools in Europe are traditionallyorganized in a relatively distant location where lectures and participants can have relaxed
and casual discussion opportunities during the program. Tsukuba is one such location in
Japan, located in 80km north of Tokyo, with easy access from major international airports
such as Narita and Haneda. The main hall and open seminar room in the Union of Library
and Information Science Building, University of Tsukuba, were used as the main venue ofthe summer school.

ACM SIGIR Forum

58

Vol. 47 No. 2 December 2013

Figure 1: Group photo of ASSIA 2013 (Day 1).
Like our fellow summer schools in Europe, Russia, and India, ASSIA aims to facilitate theresearch and education in Information Access and related fields in Asian regions by offering
the lectures taught by leading researchers in the domain. It also provides participants with
an opportunity to meet other participants from various countries with similar interests, andto have discussions with the lecturers who are authoritative in the fields. These opportunities
are particularly valuable in Asian regions since the students in Asian countries tend to havea limited chance to meet leading researchers from Europe and North America. Furthermore,
submissions to top conferences from Asian regions still have a room to catch up to Europe
and North America. Therefore, increasing awareness of the fields and providing foundations
to young students and researchers are important objectives of ASSIA.
As indicated by the name of the summer school (i.e., Information Access), ASSIA has
a wider scope than traditional IR summer schools. This reflects our long-term intention ofcovering not only IR topics but also related topics such as NLP, Digital Libraries, Visualizations in future summer schools. Having said that, as the first ASSIA, ASSIA 2013 mainly
focused on Information Retrieval and Web Search, along with applicational topics such as
E-Discovery and Crowdsourcing.
A total of 63 people registered to the summer school (54 participants, 6 lectures, and 3
organisers). We had more applications than we had planned to accommodate (which was 50),
and thus, had to close the application before the original deadline. This indicated that there
was a strong interest and need to have a summer school in Asian regions. The backgroundof participants also showed a great diversity.
Thanks to generous support from our sponsors, we were able to offer a travel support toseven students participating from China (incl. Hong Kong), India, Indonesia, and Thailand.
The travel support was awarded during the banquet on Day 2 of the summer school. We weregrateful for the sponsorship of Microsoft Research (thanks to Noboru Kuno) and Catalyst
Repository Systems (thanks to Jeremy Pickens).

ACM SIGIR Forum

59

Vol. 47 No. 2 December 2013

2

Summer School Program

ASSIA 2013 had a 3 days program which included 9 lectures, 2 panels, and a poster presentation. The summer school opened its program by having a welcome message from Shigeo
Sugimoto, the Director of Research Center for Knowledge Communities (RCKC), Universityof Tsukuba, followed by the introduction of the summer school from one of the organisers.
This section presents a summary of each program.

2.1

Lectures

Each day had three lectures. The title with a star is short lectures (60 min) while others are
standard lectures (90 min). A total of 9 lectures offered over 160 carefully selected references,which can represent a great part of IR literature, for participants to revisit even after thesummer school. A brief summary of individual lectures is as follows.

Introduction to Information Retrieval* (Mark Sanderson, RMIT University) The main program started with the introductory lecture on IR by Sanderson. Sanderson first briefly defined IR as “the study of finding relevant information in unstructured
collections of material based on a poorly specified query”. The lecture then described theearly history of IR, the range of approaches used by various IR systems to retrieve relevantmaterials. The lecture also provided the basic knowledge about text processing, link analysis,
retrieval models, and extraction of data from interaction logs.

Modern Information Retrieval Models (Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow)
The second lecture given by Ounis provided a comprehensive description of IR models, which
has been “at the forefront of IR research in the past three decades”. Ounis first introduced aretrieval model as something that specifies how documents and queries should be represented
and how relevance should be decided. Then, the lecture explained the representative IRmodels based on a series of major paradigms emerged during the history of the field. Also,
the participants learnt recent models such as search results diversification.

Evaluation of IR Systems (Mark Sanderson, RMIT University) After thegeneral introduction and comprehensive discussion of IR models, Sanderson was back toteach evaluation as the final lecture of Day 1. The lecture first introduced the concept of testcollections, its history, the components, and typical protocol. Then, issues related to scalingof test collections were discussed along with performance measure metrics. The last part ofthe lecture was about examination of test collections themselves, and statistical tests in IR
experiments.

User-Oriented Factors in Information Retrieval (Kalervo Järvelin, University of Tampere) Day 2 of the summer school started with the lecture on user-oriented
factors given by Järvelin. First, the lecture introduced the concept of information interaction
consisting of a dozen of actions taken to communicate with information. Then, the lecture
described how users are modeled in a typical test collection based evaluation. Järvelin thendiscussed user-centered evaluation and its design issues. The final part of the lecture further
looked into the study of user-oriented factors in IR and representative variables that one
might want to consider in such studies.

ACM SIGIR Forum60

Vol. 47 No. 2 December 2013

Multimedia Information Retrieval (Gareth Jones, Dublin City University)
Up till now, most lectures had assumed text contents, while Jones provided the lecture
on multimedia contents. The lecture first looked at retrieval of multimedia contents using
texts, which can be familiar to many participants. Then, it described the retrieval of spoken
contents, followed by content-based approaches to multimedia retrieval. The last parts of thelecture covered multimedia search on personal collections, exploitation of affect in multimedia
search.

Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval (Douglas W. Oard, University of Mayland) The last lecture of Day 2 was cross-lingual IR (CLIR), which was of great interest
to many participants due to Asian context, given by Oard. Oard brought a copy of RosetteStone he found in the venue building to highlight the importance of accessing different languages to increase our knowledge. The lecture described the range of issues in CLIR suchas query translation, document translation, available lexical resources, bilingual corpora,bilingual query expansion.

Web Search: Information Retrieval in Practice (Fernando Diaz, Microsoft
Research) The last day of the summer school started with the lecture on Web search
by Diaz. Diaz defined his lecture’s objective as to understand the importance of relevanceestimation in ranking, indexing, and evaluation of web search. The lecture then described
the range of signals used in raking, how to prioritize pages to index, and finally evaluation
methods used in production such as click analysis and A/B testing. The lecture ended witha reminder to be very careful about interrelation of their results.

E-Discovery (Douglas W. Oard, University of Mayland) As the one of thetimely lectures, Oard was back to give a lecture on E-Discovery. The lecture first highlighted
the characteristics of E-Discovery search as many participants, long duration, large budget,
recall-oriented goals, and authoritative relevance. Based on the TREC Legal Track, thelecture provided several key issues in the evaluation of E-Discovery technologies such as relevance estimation and authoritative judgements. The lecture concluded with future researchquestions of this new domain.

Crowdsourcing for Information Retrieval* (Gareth Jones, Dublin City University) As the second timely lecture, Jones was back to provide a lecture on crowd sourcing for IR. Although crowdsourcing has been well known to experienced researchers, this was
still a new topic to many participants. Jones first described the concept and benefits ofcrowdsourcing carefully. Then, the lecture discussed several issues raised when applying
crowdsourcing to IR research such as recruitment, management, and payment for workers.
The last part of the lecture gave a step-by-step tutorial of MTurk in the context of MediaEval
2011.

2.2

PanelsPanels were designed to offer interactive sessions for participants to gain deep insights into
common issues. The first panel was focused on paper writing, while the second post-school
panel was focused on teaching and learning of Information Access. Both panels lasted 90

ACM SIGIR Forum

61

Vol. 47 No. 2 December 2013

minutes, where each of the lecturers first gave a short advice in turn as a panelist, followed
by free discussions with participants.

How to write a solid paper The first panel was held on Day 2 and asked the lecturers
for advices to write a solid paper, which was a prominent issue to most participants, and thepanel was very lively. A great emphasis made by the panel was the importance of reading
literature to familiarize the field, find a good research topic, formulate interesting hypotheses,
which all contribute to the writing of solid papers. Many answers to participants’ questions
were also about how to find literature, how to read papers, or how to manage readinggroups. Advices specific to paper writing were also given such as establishing your own paper
structure, having informal peer reviewing before submission, how to avoid self-plagiarism,
how to report negative results, how to sell a local topic in international conferences/journals,
and so on. Test collections such as TREC, NTCIR, and CLEF were suggested as a good
resource to identify future research in IR and related domains.

How to teach and learn Information Access The second panel was held rightafter the closing of the official program on Day 3, and asked the lectures to demonstratesome of their teaching courses and materials. The idea was to share and exchange teaching and learning methods in this field among participants. Panelists shared their course
website, lecture video recording and broadcasting system, position of their course within abroader curriculum, or comparison of IR courses in CS department and LIS department, andexchanged their insight into incentive system to encourage students to learn abstract ideas(e.g., models, algorithms, etc.), how to create exercise driven by local business needs, how
to design classes with CS and LIS background students, and more. Several references werementioned to specifically discuss these issues during the panel session.

2.3

Poster Presentation

Of 54 participants, 30 gave a poster presentation at the summer school. The poster presentation was a 2 hours session on Day 1 of the program, and presented topics were fairly
diverse: Semantic Web, Multimodal interaction, E-Discovery, Multimedia Retrieval, MachineTranslation, Collaborative search, Math Retrieval, NLP, Interface design, Information needs
mining, Decision making. This diversity demonstrated a great potential research in Information Access can be developed and presented at international venues from Asian regions
even more. Many commented that they had great feedback from the lecturers and otherparticipants of the summer school. Please visit the summer school website to view the fulllist of poster presentations.

3

Participants’ Feedback

We asked participants to fill in our questionnaires to capture their feedback on the summer
school. We had 37 answers to our questionnaires. Overall feedback was very positive, and the
majority (over 80%) of participants rated all the lectures either “Very Useful” or “Useful”.
The first panel on writing also had a very good rating of over 80% said “Very Useful”. Thesesuggested that the design of ASSIA 2013 program was satisfactory to most participants.
Specific comments highlighted that participants appreciated the opportunity to meet andACM SIGIR Forum

62

Vol. 47 No. 2 December 2013

have a discussion with the world-class researchers, to learn theoretical aspects of IR topics,
and to exchange ideas with other participants.

4

Organisation

ASSIA 2013 was co-hosted by RCKC and ASSIA 2013 Organising Committee. The members of the organising committee were Hideo Joho (University of Tsukuba), Noriko Kando(National Institute of Informatics), Tetsuya Sakai (Waseda University), and Yohei Seki (University of Tsukuba). The organisation of ASSIA 2013 was further strengthened by a numberof organisations and people. Please refer to the acknowledgements for the full list of ourpartnership.

5

Conclusion

The first Asian Summer School in Information Access was successfully held in June 2013at Tsukuba, Japan. The initial development of the second ASSIA is under way. We werealso considering to form a steering committee for long-term organisation of the Information
Access summer schools in Asia. As a final note, it should be emphasised that we werealso able to build a positive relationship with the organisers of other summer schools suchas European Summer School in Information Retrieval (thanks to Juan Manuel FernándezLuna) and Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval (thanks to Pavel Braslavski).
We all listed the URLs of other summer schools in our website to help international students
be aware of other opportunities and select appropriate venues to study Information Retrieval
and Information Access. We look forward to developing more collaborations with relevantsummer schools in the future.

Acknowledgements The organising committee of ASSIA 2013 would like to thank thefollowing people and organisaitons for making the summer school successful: Microsoft Research (Platinum Sponsor); Catalyst Repository Systems (Gold Sponsor); Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), Information Environment Division, Special Interest Groupfor Information Fundations and Access Technologies (SIG-IFAT); National Institute of Informatics (NII); Asian Information Retrieval Societies (AIRS); Consortium of iSchools in
Asia-Pacific (CiSAP); NII Testbeds and Community for Information Access Research (NTCIR); all lecturers; RCKC Secretaries Ms Kaori Suenaga, Ms Kyoko Tawada, Ms Yasue
Shinozaki; student volunteers; and participants! Travel expenses of two lecturers were partly
supported by NII.

ACM SIGIR Forum

63

Vol. 47 No. 2 December 2013