On April 14th to April 18th, the 41st European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) will commence in Cologne, Germany. 250 delegates from all around the world will present and discuss their most recent discoveries to make the search for information more effective, efficient and accessible.
ECIR is Europe's leading scientific conference in information retrieval, another name for the area generally known as search engine technology, and related fields like applied machine learning and natural language processing. In this year of "digitization", the 2019 editions of ECIR and SIGIR, its international peer event are both happening on the European continent, so the organizing committees are inviting researchers, the media, and anyone interested to attend and to learn about the most recent discoveries to make the search for information more effective, efficient and accessible.
The conference has been organized by GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, one of the largest European infrastructure institutes for the social sciences in cooperation with the University of Duisburg-Essen, under the auspices of BCS, the United Kingdom's Chartered Institute for IT based in London and Swindon.
This year's ECIR is attracting more than 250 delegates from all around the world who will be visiting Cologne to enjoy the scientific programme <https://ecir2019.org/program/> at the main conference as well as in various workshops, tutorials, the doctoral consortium and industry day. Delegates are world-renowned scientists in the field as well as practitioners, early-stage researchers, and Ph.D. students. ECIR 2019 enables fruitful discussion and exchange of ideas among delegates to shape tomorrow's information landscape. This year, Professor Krisztian Balog (University of Stavanger, Norway) will give the annual Microsoft and BCS Karen Spärck Jones award lecture by its most recent recipient, who is an expert in name search. Algorithms, methods, and machine learning models such as the ones presented at the conference have become the hallmarks of Web search engines, and many of the papers presented are co-authored by the big Web search, e-commerce and information companies (e.g., Google, Bing, Yandex). The field of search, like other sub-areas of computer science, has increasingly been influenced by advances in artificial intelligence research such as 'deep' neural network, as pioneered by researchers including last month's ACM Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey E. Hinton and Yann LeCun.
This year, a public discussion panel will be held on Wednesday, April 17, 2019 at 16:00 at Maternushaus entitled "Societal Challenges for Search: Privacy, Bias, Accountability, Transparency and some other scary things" in cooperation with the Cologne Science Forum ("Kölner Wissenschaftsrunde", KWR) to connect with the general public in an area that increasingly impacts society at large.