Nine current and former CIIR faculty, students, and postdocs participated as part of a group of 61 researchers in the Third Strategic Workshop in Information Retrieval in Lorne (SWIRL), held in Lorne, Australia on February 13-16, 2018.
The goal of the SWIRL workshop (also held in 2004 and 2012) is to explore the long-range issues of the Information Retrieval field, to recognize challenges that are on (or even over) the horizon, to build consensus on some of the key challenges, and to disseminate the resulting information to the research community. The intent is that this description of open problems will help to inspire researchers and graduate students to address the questions, and will provide funding agencies data to focus and coordinate support for information retrieval research.
The SWIRL participants included CIIR co-directors James Allan and Bruce Croft, along with CIIR alumni Jamie Callan (Carnegie Mellon Univ.; Ph.D. alum and former faculty), Ben Carterette (Univ. of Delaware; Ph.D. alum), Jeff Dalton (Univ. of Glasgow; Ph.D. alum), Fernando Diaz (Spotify; Ph.D. alum), Laura Dietz (Univ. of New Hampshire; former postdoc), Mark Sanderson (RMIT; former postdoc), and Mark Smucker (Univ. of Waterloo; Ph.D. alum). In addition to the nine CIIR personnel and alums in attendance, nine of the other SWIRL participants have co-authored papers with CIIR researchers.
The organizers of this year’s workshop were Shane Culpepper of RMIT (a research collaborator with the CIIR) and CIIR alum Fernando Diaz. A report will be published on the results of the three-day discussions among the researchers. More at: https://sites.google.com/view/swirl3/.