SUMMER SCHOOL REPORT

7th Russian Summer School in Information
Retrieval (RuSSIR 2013)
Pavel Braslavski
Kontur Labs &Ural Federal University, Russia
pbras@yandex.ru
Stefan Rüger
The Open University, UK
stefan.rueger@open.ac.uk

1

Nikita Zhiltsov
Kazan Federal University, Russia
nikita.zhiltsov@gmail.com
Yana Volkovich
Barcelona Media, Spainyana.volkovich@barcelonamedia.org

Introduction

The 7th Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval (RuSSIR 2013) was held on September
16-20, 2013 in Kazan, Russia.1 The school was co-organized by the Kazan Federal University2
and the Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar (ROMIP)3 .
The RuSSIR school series started in 2007 and has developed into a renowned academic eventwith solid international participation. Previously, RuSSIR took place in Yekaterinburg, Taganrog,Petrozavodsk, Voronezh, Saint Petersburg, and Yaroslavl. RuSSIR courses were taught by many
prominent international researchers in IR and cognate areas.
Kazan, about 800 km east of Moscow, has the population of about 1.1 million people and is
one of the oldest Russian cities. Geographical and cultural aspects of both Europe and Asia cometogether here. Founded in 1804, Kazan University is the third oldest university in Russia. It hasover 40,000 full-time students in 180 major degree programmes. Kazan University is the almamater and life-long affiliation of the Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792–1856),
the developer of non-Euclidean geometry, a fact that was symbolised by a hyperbolic triangle on
RuSSIR t-shirts.
In 2013, the RuSSIR programme featured a track on audio and music IR alongside core information retrieval topics. This led to fruitful discussions among participants coming from different
domains and allowed students to learn cross-disciplinary competencies. The school programme
consisted of a plenary invited course, six courses running in two parallel sessions, two sponsor
presentations, as well as the RuSSIR Young Scientist Conference. Music Hackathon, a co-locatedevent with a focus on hands-on development, was an innovation of this year.
1

http://romip.ru/russir2013/
http://kpfu.ru/
3
http://romip.ru/
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The school welcomed 93 participants that were selected based on their applications. The
majority of students came from Russia, but there were also 7 students from Europe, and 2 fromthe rest of the world. The RuSSIR audience comprised of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoralstudents, as well as industrial developers. The total number of participants including students,
sponsor representatives, lecturers and organisers was 134.
Thanks to support from the sponsors, participation in the school was free of charge. In
addition, 19 accommodation grants were awarded to participants and 6 European students werefully funded through an European Science Foundation grant.

2Courses

The RuSSIR programme was compiled based on reviewing of submitted course proposals by theprogramme committee. Each course proposal was reviewed by at least six PC members. In total,eleven course prospects were submitted, six of which were selected for the school programme.
Additionally, there was an invited course. Each of the seven courses consisted of five 90-minutelectures taught in five subsequent days. The invited course ran as a plenary session, the other six
courses ran in two parallel sessions.
Spoken Content Retrieval: Challenges, Techniques and Applications – Gareth
Jones, Dublin City University, Ireland
In his invited course, Prof. Jones introduced main challenges and technologies of spoken
content retrieval. He reviewed the history of the discipline to date, its core technologies, its
relationship to text information retrieval, critical system design issues, and application domains.
The course also had an overview of initiatives for evaluation of speech retrieval, available researchand development resources in the area of spoken content retrieval, and open challenges goingforward.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Models – Massimo Melucci, University ofPadua, Italy
This course surveyed the core information retrieval models – vector-space model, the classicalprobabilistic model, and the language models, as well as latent semantic analysis.
Large Scale Information Retrieval – Paolo Boldi, University of Milan, Italy
The course covered topics crucial for modern IR. Special attention was paid to the impact of
the size of data on design of algorithms and data structures for IR. The course focused on link
analysis for web search, graph compression techniques, perfect hashing, web crawling, clusteringcomputation in large graphs, as well as analysis of social graphs.
Novel Representations and Methods in Text Classification – Manuel Montes-yGomez and Hugo Jair Escalante, National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics (INAOE), Mexico
The course explained main traditional text document representation and classification techniques. Moreover, the lectures covered recent developments in text classification – for example,
classification techniques accounting for document context and automated construction of classification models.
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Content- and Context-based Music Similarity and Retrieval – Markus Schedl andPeter Knees, University of Linz, AustriaThe course surveyed methods that extract features both from the music content and music
context data via web and social media. Based on these features, students could learn methods tocompute similarities between songs and music artists, a key ingredient of music retrieval systems.
Adaptivity in Audio and Music Retrieval – Andreas Nürnberger and Sebastian
Stober, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany
This course provided an overview and in-depth discussion of selected ideas and concepts forthe adaptation of systems to search and explore audio collections. I particular, the course dealt
with approaches that allow to structure and visualise sets of audio objects under specific userinterests in different scenarios.
Query by Singing/Humming and Audio Fingerprinting as Two Successful Paradigmsof Music Information Retrieval – Jyh-Shing Roger Jang, Taiwan University, China
The course introduced two of the most successful paradigms of content-based music information
retrieval: QBSH (Query by Singing/Humming) and AFP (Audio Fingerprinting). The components of the approach – feature extraction, comparison methods, speedup techniques, optimisation
strategies, etc. – were considered in detail.
Additionally, school sponsors gave two presentations. Natalia Ostapuk, Tatiana Lando, andSergey Zubkov presented a tutorial on Tomita, a free fact-extracting tool from Yandex. Alexey
Voropaev gave a presentation on the crawler architecture implemented by Mail.Ru and relatedissues.

3Young Scientist Conference

For the seventh time the RuSSIR Young Scientist Conference (RuSSIR YSC 2013) was held within
the school. The goal of the conference was to provide a platform for ideas and knowledge exchange
between all RuSSIR participants. The conference ran over two consecutive evenings and consistedof two parts, oral presentations and poster sessions. There were two types of submissions: fullpapers that underwent a thorough reviewing process and short poster notes. Out of 18 submitted
full papers seven were accepted for oral presentation at the conference and subsequent publishedin Kazan University Proceedings:• Artem Churkin and George Mazurkevich “Substitutions Acquisition Method for an Informational Retrieval System”• Sergey Ermakov and Liana Ermakova “Linguistic approach to suicide detection”• Nikolay Glazyrin “Mid-level Features for Audio Chord Estimation using Stacked DenoisingAutoencoders”• Dmitry Kostyrev, Sergey Anishchenko, and Mikhail Petrushan “Time Invariant Hand Gesture Recognition for Human-Computer Interaction”

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• Svetlana Popova and Ivan Khodyrev “Ranking in keyphrase extraction problem: is it usefulto use statistics of words occurrences?”• Alexey Raskin “Comparison of Chains Clustering Techniques”• Dmitry Ulyanov “NMF-based method for drum separation”
During the poster session all participants of the school were provided with an opportunity todiscuss their current research results and ideas. In total about 70 posters were displayed. Similar
to the previous years, the YSC poster session was among main RuSSIR highlights.

4Social Programme

The Welcome Reception took place in the evening of the first day of the school, on September 16.
Wine and hors d’oeuvre were served in the restaurant of the Hayal hotel located near the mainschool site. After a short opening ceremony participants had a perfect chance to get to know eachother in a relaxed atmosphere.
A sport event at university sport center on Wednesday, September 18 offered participants awelcome change from lectures and conference sessions. Participants had to choose between futsal,volleyball, or just cheering on the players.
The School party took place on Thursday night, September 19, in Zheltaya Kofta (YellowShirt), a club whose name and atmosphere refer to the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and Russian
avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century in general. School participants were offeredsnacks, wine and beer. The party finished with a disco. As a precaution, the lectures on Friday
morning started two hours later.

5Hackathon

This year we decided to complement school courses with a co-located event of a different type –a Music Hackathon4 . The Hackathon started on Friday evening and ran for 24 hours. The event
was open for RuSSIR students as well as for participants registered with Hackathon only. The
task of participating teams was to develop a music mock-up application of any kind.
Seven projects took part in Hackathon (including a project by coaches that was out of competition), while 34 people were involved in the activity in total.
The TwiMoMusic project won this contest. The application analyses geotagged tweets for twofacets: sentiment and mentions of music artists, albums, and songs, thus creating a geographicalmap of both mood and music listened by the people locally. The Pintrack project received a
special mention of the jury. Pintrack is a browser extension that allows to assign a music track to
any web page, so the page visitor will listen to it while surfing.
4

https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/russir-music-hackathon-2013/

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6Conclusions

The 7th Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval was a very successful event: It brought
together participants with diverse backgrounds from Russia and abroad and facilitated crossdisciplinary exchange of experience and ideas. Students had an unique opportunity to learn newmaterial that is not normally otherwise presented in university curricula and got feedback frompeers and teachers during the poster sessions and informal communications. The event contributed
to supporting a lively IR community in Russia and establishing ties with international colleagues.
We received very positive feedback from attendees on all the different aspects of the school.
The 8th RuSSIR will be held in Nizhny Novgorod in August 2014, organised by the Nizhny
Novgorod chapter of the Higher School of Economics.

7Acknowledgments

We thank all Local Organizing Committee members (namely, Airat Khasianov, Valery Solovyev,
Vladimir Ivanov, Rinat Gareev, Danila Zaikin, Alexander Kirillovich, Marsel Sidikov, Fedor Nikolaev) for their committment, which made the school possible, all Programme Committee members
for their time and efforts ensuring a high level of quality for the RuSSIR 2013 programme and, inparticular, all the lecturers and students who came to Kazan and made the school such a success.
We also thank student volunteers who contributed to school organisation on-site. Our special
gratitude goes to Maxim Gubin who was responsible for legal and financial matters.
We appreciate generous financial support from our sponsors – Yandex5 , Mail.Ru6 , and Dream
Industries7 (gold level); Russian Foundation for Basic Research8 (silver level); Google9 , ABBYY10 ,and STEL CS11 (bronze level). We also thank the ELIAS network12 of the European Science
Foundation and The Open University13 for their support.

5

http://yandex.com
http://go.mail.ru/
7
http://dreamindustries.co/8
http://www.rfbr.ru/rffi/eng
9
http://google.com/
10
http://abbyy.com/
11
http://stel.ru/en/12
http://www.elias-network.eu/
13
http://www.open.ac.uk/
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