You might remember a while ago, we solicited some examples of videos for the Video Preview program for CHI 2013. Well, it took a while, but the CHI 2013 Video Previews web site is now live.

The Video Previews are a new feature for the CHI Conference series, replacing the long-running CHI Madness daily plenary session to save time in the over-crowded schedule. But really, the Video Previews is more than just a reason to sleep in a little longer: the goal is to make it easier to understand what the presentations are about, before, during, and after the conference.

The previews were intended to serve multiple purposes:

• To provide a preview of what will be presented at the conference, so that attendees could plan their schedule
• To be played on-site on large displays throughout the conference venue to give people an idea of what’s coming up next
• To be distributed to attendees as part of the electronic proceedings on the USB stick, and on the iPhone and Android apps.

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It’s that time of the year again, time to solicit your latest and greatest HCIR ideas in written and poster form. We are happy to announce that this year’s Human-Computer Information Retrieval Symposium (HCIR 2013) will be held on October 3 and 4 in Vancouver, BC. Building on last year’s meeting, we will have both short and full papers, as well as plenty of opportunity for discussion and interaction. Short papers will be presented at the poster session, while full papers will be peer-reviewed to first-tier conference standards, will get an regular oral presentation slot and will be archived in the ACM Digital Library, as were last year’s papers. The deadline for submission is June 30th. For more details, please see the CFP.

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Gonzalo Ramos and I are the video previews chairs for CHI 2013. Video previews are a new way of promoting and advertising CHI publications before, during, and after the conference.; they will replace the traditional live CHI Madness presentations.

We would like to put together a small set of short videos (approx 30 seconds long) that illustrate best practices in CHI madness presentations.  These videos will be made available to CHI 2013 authors as examples best practices. If you have a video or a timed slide deck that you would be willing to contribute, please let me know.  We will select a few videos, describe key aspects that we think make them appropriate for this purpose, and publish them along other instructions for the authors.

Thanks for your help!

We are happy to announce that the 2012 Human-Computer Information Retrieval Symposium (HCIR 2012) will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts October 4 – 5, 2012. The HCIR series of workshops has provided a venue for discussion of ongoing research on a range of topics related to interactive information retrieval, including interaction techniques, evaluation, models and algorithms for information retrieval, visual design, user modeling, etc. The focus of these meetings has been to bring together people from industry and academia for short presentations and in-depth discussion. Attendance has grown steadily since the first meeting, and as a result this year we have decided to modify the structure of the meeting to accommodate the increasing demand for participation.

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The 2011 ACM / IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2011) will take place June 13-17, 2011 in Ottawa, Canada. The JCDL conference series brings together researchers and practitioners interested in the application of technology to libraries and librarianship.

The theme for JCDL 2011 is “Digital Libraries: Bringing Together Scholars, Scholarship and Research Data”, in recognition of the changes the digital age is now bringing to scholarship, broadly writ. Publishing models are changing, along with the breadth of digital material that must be managed coherently in the context of users forcing the move from information silos to a landscape of interconnected systems supporting scholarship for both research and education.

Important dates: Full Papers, Workshops, Tutorials, and Panels submissions are due by January 23, 2011 at 8pm PST (GMT -8); Short Papers, Posters, Demonstrations submissions are due by February 6, 2011 at 8pm PST (GMT -8); Doctoral Consortium Abstracts submissions are due by March 21, 2011.

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The IIiX2010 conference is coming up, and it promises to be a great week. For me it will start with the Doctoral Consortium, followed by the conference proper, and capped off by the HCIR workshop. I’ve sat in on some doctoral consortia in the past, but this will be my first fully-fledged one. I am looking forward to the presentations and the discussion, and I will be blogging about the various presentations in the coming week.

I don’t expect to get much sleep!

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The BooksOnline’10 workshop to be held in conjunction with the CIKM 2010 conference in Toronto this fall will include keynote addresses by James Crawford (Google Books) and by John Ockerbloom (University of Pennsylvania). It will also feature the following papers, which will ultimately appear in the ACM Digital Library.

• HCI Design Principles for eReaders. Jennifer Pearson (Swansea University), George Buchanan (City University) and Harold Thimbleby (Swansea University)
• The sBook: Towards Social and Personalized Learning Experiences. Myriam Ribière, Jérome Picault and Sylvain Squedin (Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France)
• Real-Time Document Collaboration Using iPads. Jennifer Pearson (Swansea University) and George Buchanan (City University)
• Ebooks Children Would Want to Read and Engage with. Monica Landoni (University of Lugano)
• A System for the Collaborative Reading of Digital Books with the Partially Sighted. W. Xavier Snelgrove and Ronald M. Baecker (University of Toronto)
• Implementing New Knowledge Environments: Building Upon Research Foundations to Understand Books and Reading in the Digital Age. Ray Siemens and Julie Meloni (University of Victoria)
• Working with First Nations: On-Demand Book Service. Nadia Caidi and Margaret Lam (University of Toronto)
• Biblioteca de Livros Digitais: The Privileged Space of a Transliterate Experience. Fernanda Bonacho (Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
• The Active Reading Task for Evaluating E-books. Monica Landoni (University of Lugano)

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The 3rd workshop on Patent Information Retrieval (PAIR 2010) will be held in conjunction with CIKM 2010 on October 26th. Patents pose specific challenges with respect to information retrieval, and thus it’s unsurprising that the topic should receive focused attention in a series of workshops. What’s particularly interesting about this workshop is that rather than focusing solely on technical issues, its CFP specifically invites participation from patent retrieval practitioners:

We encourage IP professionals to present their special information needs and IR&KM researchers to present relevant technical ideas, for example for high recall search in prior art searching.

I really like this grounded approach to a complex problem space. Bringing together researchers are domain experts should benefit both groups: researchers should be able to draw on specific use cases and get a better understanding of searchers’ information needs, while patent search domain experts can get exposure to new tools and interfaces. I would love to see this approach repeated for other domains that involve information seeking such as medicine, law, and intelligence analysis, etc.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to attend it and the BooksOnline’10 workshop at the same time.

The BooksOnline ’10 workshop will be held on October 26, 2010 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in conjunction with the CIKM 2010 conference. The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers with interests related to various aspects online reading, including digital collections, user experience, and design and technology. See the Call for Papers for a more detailed description of relevant topics. The workshop is organized by Gabriella Kazai (Microsoft Research, UK) and Peter Brusilovsky (University of Pittsburgh).

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Traditional models of academic publishing have been under attack from a number of directions, with factors such as the decreasing cost of publication and dissemination leading to the proliferation of online journals and alternative publishing models. One such alternative, straddling the border between  blog and refereed publication, is Not Relevant, a web site recently created by Ian Soboroff as a venue for publishing and discussing work related to information retrieval that might have been rejected by traditional publication venues.

The goal of Not Relevant is to provide a novel dissemination venue for research in information retrieval, particularly when that research does not fit well in existing channels. Not Relevant strives for open dissemination of research, to put that research into the wild quickly, and to foster open and public discussion of that research.

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