Proceedings of the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

Abstract

It is my great pleasure to welcome you to Santiago de Chile, my hometown, and to the 38th International SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, the premier annual forum for presentations of research in information retrieval (IR) and related topics. This six-day event has a broad technical program that we hope you find interesting, useful, and insightful. Amazingly, SIGIR 2015 is not only held in my hometown, but also where I did my high school studies. Could I ever imagine that? No way! So in this venue where I have plenty of mixed memories, we start the conference on Sunday with eight great tutorials, thanks to Yoelle Maarek; the Doctoral Consortium, organized by J. Shane Culpepper and Brian Davidson; and we finish the day with the opening reception in the central patio. The next three days we have the core of the conference, highlighted with the keynotes by Nick Belkin, (Salton Award) on how we interact with information, and ChengXiang Zhai on game theory applied to IR. We also have 70 technical papers selected by the program committee chaired by Mounia Lalmas, Alistair Moffat and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto. Thanks for your great and hard work! We also have 79 short papers and 12 demos presented in a special session before the banquet on Tuesday that will be held at a nearby palace on Cerro Santa Lucía. Thanks to Maarten de Rijke, Ee-Peng Lim and Ryen White for handling the short papers and Djoerd Hiemstra and Mirella Moro for arranging the demonstrations. On Wednesday we also have the industry track, SIRIP, organized by Hang Li and Jaime Teevan. This track combines eight invited talks and four refereed papers. This day we have been able to keep the number of parallel tracks to just three, and also have the final panel on industry impact from academia, as a single track event. Finally, on Thursday we have seven interesting workshops, thanks to the committee chaired by Fernando Diaz and Diane Kelly.