While the needs of the casual web searcher are usually well met today, responses for more complex queries are often unsatisfactory. The DoSSIER project aims to change that by addressing the different information needs of professional users. At the beginning of October, the project members used the opportunity of relatively low COVID-numbers and met in person for the first time – naturally while observing all the necessary health protocols.
DoSSIER is an EU Horizon 2020 project that unites Information Retrieval (IR) experts from five EU member states with academic and industrial partners from all over the world. The Research Studio Data Science from RSA FG is one of the Austrian participants.
The project explores how users comprehend, formulate, and access information in professional environments. DoSSIER groups its research activities into the three general areas: applications, methods, and models. These feed into each other to generate new hypotheses, identify new experimental procedures, and bring about a better understanding of knowledge and information needs, and the processes by which the two interact.
DoSSIER also aims at training a new generation of scientifically principled, creative, entrepreneurial, and innovative students with the academic and industrial experience necessary to make a significant impact on professional search in Europe, and hence on the European economy.
With certain prerequisites, but in person: A long-awaited meet-up in Austria
In October, almost two years after DoSSIER started, the project members finally met in person in the Austrian town of Gumpoldskirchen for a week-long workshop. As is self-evident in the ongoing pandemic, they made sure to follow all the health and hygiene protocols needed to ensure a safe encounter.
The project retreat mainly addressed the students involved in the project: They were to be supported in becoming fully fledged researchers in the field of information retrieval and encouraged in contributing to the DoSSIER project itself. Thus, the main focus of the meeting was on student presentations through which students involved in DoSSIER described their research topics, their progress, and challenges that they are dealing with on the way to answer their research questions. Each presentation was followed up with questions and discussions from project members and peers.
In addition to student presentations, the project retreat also included a number of workshops held by the advisory board on natural language processing topics and career planning. The meeting ended with a day-long hackathon aiming to develop a prototype of a professional search engine. The initial search engine version designed by students in this hackathon will continuously be empowered by the algorithms developed by researchers within the DoSSIER project, as well as any additional findings that will be published.
All attendants were either vaccinated against COVID, healed or tested.