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!

The conference itself will start on Thursday, and will include a bunch of papers I am interested in, including

• A Survey of Patent Users: An Analysis of Tasks, Behavior, Search Functionality and System Requirements. Hideo Joho (University of Tsukuba, Japan), Leif Azzopardi (University of Glasgow, UK)
• Constructing Query-biased Summaries: a Comparison of Human and System Generated Snippets. Lorena Leal-Bando (RMIT University, Australia), Falk Scholer (RMIT University, Australia), Andrew Turpin (University of Melbourne, Australia)
• On the Potential Search Effectiveness of MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) Terms. Ying-Hsang Liu (Charles Sturt University, Australia)

I suppose, I should also pay some attention to

• Interactive Information Seeking via Selective Application of Contextual Knowledge. Gene Golovchinsky, Jeremy Pickens (FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc., USA)

In addition, following on a workshop at SIGIR 2010, there will be a panel discussion about the role of user simulation in HCIR research, which I expect to create some fireworks, what with Kalervo Jaervelin and Nick Belkin taking opposite sides. (Come to think of it, with anyone and Nick Belkin taking opposite sides.)

9:00 AM – 10:30 AM Simulating Users is the Way Forward in Evaluation of Interactive Information Retrieval

Join us for an Oxford-style debate of the proposition that simulating users is the way forward in evaluation of interactive information retrieval. The debate will include time for questions from the audience and an audience vote.Affirmative Team
Leif Azzopardi, University of Glasgow, UK
Kalvero Jarvelin, University of Tampere, Finland
Jaap Kamps, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Mark Smucker, University of Waterloo, Canada

Negative Team
Nicholas J. Belkin, Rutgers University, USA
Pia Borlund, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark
Ian Ruthven, University of Strathclyde, UK
Elaine Toms, Dalhousie University, Canada

Moderator
Ross Todd, Rutgers University, USA

Finally, the week will wind up with the HCIR workshop.  In its fourth year, this workshop has really matured into a mini conference series: this year in addition to a few papers with oral presentations, it has challenge reports, posters, and position papers. I had a sneak preview of some of the work as a PC member, but I am looking forward to the presentations and to the discussion around the workshop.

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