Last week Yasin Ghafourian, one of our researchers at the Studio Data Science visited Madrid to participate in the 45th Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2022). SIGIR is one of the most reputable conferences in the field of information retrieval (IR) and focuses on all aspects of information storage, retrieval and dissemination, including research strategies, output schemes and system evaluations. After a two-year hiatus in holding conferences face-to-face, the in-person gathering and interchange is once again progressively returning to international societies. After earlier this year the European Conference on Information Retrieval was held hybrid, now SIGIR 2022 gathered IR researchers from all over the world to meet in person.
Yasin is a PhD student in the European DoSSIER project and his project is entitled “Relevance Models based on the Knowledge Gap”. The main question in Yasin’s research concerns how search systems can help users to effectively overcome their knowledge gap as they are using the systems for learning purposes. With regard to Yasin’s research focus, there have been many relevant paper presentations and tutorials held during the SIGIR conference among which we can enumerate SIGIR’s tutorial on “IR Models, Evaluation and User Studies” in addition to papers investigating interactive and user-centered evaluation of search systems such as the paper entitled “A Study of Cross-Session Cross-Device Search Within an Academic Digital Library”.
DoSSIER is an EU Horizon 2020 ITN/ETN project and it will elucidate, model, and address the different information needs of professional users. Research Studios Austria is one of the project participants and hosting institutes in DoSSIER. Almost all DoSSIER PhD students and a handful of senior project members were present at SIGIR 2022 last week. They also had side meetings to coordinate and discuss the further steps in the project.