Researchers, CICS Faculty Gather in Northampton, MA for International IR Conference

Distinguished professor Bruce Croft, interim dean of the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) and director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), and James Allan, professor and co-director of the CIIR, are co-chairs of the 5th Annual ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) being held in Northampton, MA on September 27 - 30, 2015 at the Hotel Northampton.

Researchers from around the world, from such locations as Italy, Canada, The Netherlands, Gambia, Israel, Austria, Australia, United Kingdom, India, Qatar, China, Brazil, Germany, and across the U.S., will spend four days discussing the latest advances in information retrieval (IR) research.

CICS professor Andrew McCallum, director of the Center for Data Science and the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory, will give the keynote address, "Embedded Representations of Lexical and Knowledge-Base Semantics." University of Delaware professor and UMass Amherst computer science alum Ben Carterette ('08) and University of Glasgow professor Leif Azzopardi will present tutorials during the conference.

Research topics being presented during the conference vary from theoretical frameworks of information retrieval to applications such as online news tracking.

This year's ICTIR sponsors include the ACM, SIGIR, CIIR, Google, Microsoft Research, Oracle Labs, and Amherst, MA-based Lexalytics.

For more information on the ICTIR 2015 conference, go to ictir2015.org.