ECIR 2013: in Search of Everything

On March 24 -27 2013, the 35th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) took place in Russia. Yandex and the HSE School of Applied Mathematics and Information Science organized the conference, which was held in Russia for the first time. More than 300 researchers, mainly from Western European research centres and universities, took part .

The conference represented different types of research works, from new mathematical models to successful industrial projects. Areas of research include search engine architecture, ranking of search results, social network and multimedia search, images and music search, text classification and categorization, data analysis and data mining  search processes, including event detection from  data flow, recommender systems, and modern social information systems.

The conference started with workshops and minicourses. The HSE School of Applied Mathematics and Information Science worked as co-organizer of the workshop ‘Formal Concept Analysis Meets Information Retrieval (FCA4IR)’. Lots of participants came to the workshop; the lecture room was packed, and  people had to stand in the aisle. The workshop started with a  mini-course by Claudio Carpineto (FUB, Rome), who spoke on the applications of formal concept analysis in information search over the last three decades.

The lectures by guest speakers were highly informative and interesting. Jean-Francois Boulicaut, Professor at INSA Lyon spoke about the modern challenges for the effective application of formal concept analysis. Boris Mirkin, HSE Tenured Professor, shared his ideas and experience of construction and processing of the subject taxonomies and ontologies based on text collections. Other reports ofadvanced and early stages research were presented in the workshop, the flexible character of which was declared by all to be an undisputable advantage. 

Several lecturers, graduate students and students of the HSE School of Applied Mathematics and Information Science presented papers. The programme complex FCART, developed at the HSE Scientific and Educational Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Structural Analysis, roused great interest amongthe participants.

It was clear from the start that the conference covered almost everything relevant for the technologies of information search and data analysis. Fortunately, our HSE researchers demonstrate high potential in this area.