Informer: Autumn 2021 Issue Out Now

Informer: Autumn 2021 Issue Out Now

http://irsg.bcs.org/informer/

In the Autumn 2021 issue
By Martin White on 21st October 2021 

I’ve given a lot of prominence to the forthcoming Search Solutions 2021 event on 23/24 November with Tutorials on the Tuesday  and the Conference on the Wednesday. Apart from one tutorial it will (sadly) be a virtual event. The IRSG AGM will take place at the end of the Conference, and a call for nominations to the Committee is included in this issue. Over the last few months the IRSG web site has been cleansed and migrated into the BCS Group template. We are working on a new template for Informer, but that may not be visible until early 2022. ECIR 2022 is now gathering momentum. It will be held on-site in Stavanger on 10-14 April but there will also be support for virtually-attending delegates.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2021/10/in-the-autumn-2021-issue/


Search Solutions 2021 23/24 November
By Martin White on 21st October 2021 

We had hoped to run the Search Solutions 2021 Conference and Tutorials on-site at the BCS London HQ but constraints on the number of delegates that could be accommodated because of Covid concerns meant that last month we made the decision to go virtual with the Conference (which worked well last year) and with one of the tutorials. As you will see the one-day tutorial will be held at the BCS London HQ.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2021/10/search-solutions-2021-23-24-november-2/


Call for nominations to the BCS IRSG Committee
By Martin White on 21st October 2021 

The BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group invites nominations for the following positions:
– Vice-Chair
– Secretary
– Inclusion Officer
– Six ordinary members of the committee
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2021/10/call-for-nominations-to-the-bcs-irsg-committee/


IRSG web site revisions
By Martin White on 21st October 2021 

The new BCS IRSG web site has been up and running for a couple of months now. The web team at the BCS HQ were a pleasure to work with, and I’d like to thank Simon Curd and Fiona James For their patience and expertise converting my suggestions into the BCS Group template. There are a few pages which need a polish but overall it seems to be working well.

I’d like to draw your attention to the Resources page, which has been completely revised.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2021/10/irsg-web-site-revisions/


ECIR 2022 Stavanger 10-14 April 2022 
By Martin White on 21st October 2021 

The 44th European Conference on Information Retrieval will take place on site in Stavanger, Norway.  Sessions will also be streamed for delegates who are not able to travel to Norway. There has been a very good response to the invitations to all the sections of this conference. The conference team has set up an excellent web site and you can track developments via Twitter https://twitter.com/ecir2022
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2021/10/ecir-2022-stavanger-10-14-april-2022/


IR and ACL Anthologies
By Martin White on 21st October 2021 

The US equivalent of IRSG is SIGIR, which publishes its Forum newsletter every six months. This is always a very good read and you do not have to be a member of SIGIR to do so. One of the feature articles in the June issue (which only came online in October!) is an introduction to the IR Anthology, a recently releaased structured collection of almost 60,000 research papers. The well-establishedACL Anthology currently hosts 71505 papers on the study of computational linguistics and natural language processing.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2021/10/ir-and-acl-anthologies/


Big Information and big budgets
By Martin White on 21st October 2021 

The concept of Big Data has been around for some time. John Mashey at Silicon Graphics is usually credited with inventing the term in a presentation he gave in 1998. Without doubt big data is very difficult to manage and the demand for people with data science skills never seems to slow down. However much less attention has been paid to Big Information and the equivalent need for information scientists, a term invented in 1958 by Jason Farradane.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2021/10/big-information-and-big-budgets/


History of the Institute of Information Scientists 1958-2002
By Martin White on 21st October 2021 

Over the last two years I have been working with Dr. Sandra Ward and Professor Charles Oppenheim in writing a history of the Institute of Information Scientists. The IIS was founded in 1958, largely due to the vision and commitment of Jason Farradane and the support of G. Malcolm Dyson. The IIS merged/was taken over by the Library Association in 2002. The archive of the IIS, such as the minutes of Council and Committees and the minutes of the AGM have vanished so we had to compile the history by reading through back issues of Inform, the newsletter of the IIS, and related publications.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2021/10/history-of-the-institute-of-information-scientists-1958-2002/


Book Review ‘Between the spreadsheets’ Susan Walsh
By Martin White on 21st October 2021 

The full title of this book is Between the Spreadsheets – Classifying and Fixing Dirty Data. What a superb title! It makes you smile before you even open the book. At last there is a book that focuses on content quality and does so in a very practical way. Susan Walsh (aka The Classification Guru)  is an information entrepreneur who somewhat accidentally fell into the business of sorting out messy data. At the heart of Susan’s methodology is COAT, which focuses on data Consistency, Organisation, Accuracy and Trustworthiness. Having spent much of this year working on an e-commerce search project I can confirm that even market leading e-commerce companies are at the mercy of poor quality data generated by suppliers. The company had to depend on suppliers paying attention to data quality and yet in search after search rogue products were presented purely as a result of inconsistent and often incoherent codes being applied to products.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2021/10/book-review-between-the-spreadsheets-susan-walsh/


Events Autumn 2021
By Andy Macfarlane on 21st October 2021 

Note: Due to the COVID-19 crisis some events have been cancelled, postponed or will be run virtually. We have provided information on each of the events with the current status at the time of writing. Please check the URL of the event for further details.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2021/10/events-autumn-2021/


And finally….
By Martin White on 21st October 2021 

I suspect that the name G. Malcolm Dyson in the History of the IIS item above will be unfamiliar to anyone who has not been in chemical information retrieval for quite a number of decades. Dyson developed a linear notation for organic chemical compounds in 1946, initially with a view to supporting the use of punched cards to retrieve information.  In 1959 Dyson was Research Director at Chemical Abstracts Service and had started working with H.P Luhn (IBM) on using a computer to handle the searching process, even if the 1401 computer only had 8k of core memory. The cheminformatics research at the Information School, University of Sheffield, can trace its origins back to Emeritus Professor Michael Lynch, who worked at CAS (initially with Dyson) from 1961 to 1965.
https://irsg.bcs.org/informer/2021/10/and-finally-6/

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Opportunities for Authors 
If you are an expert in information retrieval or any aspect of search who has strong writing skills, we invite you to contribute to Informer. Please send an article proposal to us at: irsg-odSCf/[email protected]
For more information about the BCS IRSG, please go to: http://irsg.bcs.org/about.php

About Informer
Informer is the quarterly newsletter of the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG). Its aim is to provide insights and inspiration to researchers and professionals working in all aspects of search and information retrieval. Our articles provide accessible and timely coverage of important topics, ranging from focused, practical advice, to concise overviews of broader topics, and to deeper, research-oriented articles and opinion pieces.

The IRSG is a Specialist Group of BCS. Its mission is to provide a focus for the European IR community, facilitate communication between researchers and practitioners and promote the adoption of IR research within industry. We host a major European conference (ECIR) and provide an associated programme of workshops, seminars and events. The IRSG is free to join via the BCS website, which provides access to further IR articles, events and resources.

BCS is the industry body for IT professionals. With members in over 100 countries around the world, BCS is the leading professional and learned society in the field of computers and information systems.

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