Workshop Goals
EIIR workshop will be held during ECIR-2008 in Glasgow. Some of the major goals we aim at are:
- Shed light on efficiency-related problems of modern high-scale Information Retrieval (IR) - Web, distributed technologies, peer to peer architectures - and new IR environments - Desktop search, Enterprise/Expert search, mobile devices, etc -.
- Foster collaboration between different research groups in order to explore new and ground-breaking ideas
Workshop Description
Today's technological advancements have allowed for vast amounts of information to be widely generated, disseminated, and stored. This exponentially increasing amount of information has rendered the retrieval of relevant information a necessary and cumbersome task. The field of Information Retrieval addresses this task by developing systems in an effective and efficient way. Specifically, IR effectiveness deals with retrieving the most relevant information to a user need, while IR efficiency deals with providing fast and ordered access to large amounts of information.
The efficiency of IR systems is of utmost importance, because it ensures that systems scale up to the vast amounts of information needing retrieval. This is an important topic of research for both academic and corporative environments. In academia, it is imperative for new ideas and techniques to be evaluated on as near-realistic environments as possible; this is reflected in the past Terabyte track and recent Million Query track organised by the Text REtrieval Evaluation Conferences (TREC).
In corporate environments, it is important that systems response time is kept low, and the amount of data processed high. These efficiency concerns need to be addressed in a principled way, so that they can be adapted to new platforms and environments, such as information retrieval from mobile devices, desktop search, distributed peer to peer, expert search, multimedia retrieval, and so on. Efficiency research over the past years has focused on efficient indexing, storage (compression) and retrieval of data (query processing strategies).
What are the efficiency concerns regarding IR applications (both new and traditional)?
- Do new applications create novel efficiency problems?
- Can existing efficiency related technology deal with these new applications?
- About state-of-the-art efficiency: has there been any advance in the last decade, or is it at a stand-still?
- To what extent is efficiency separated from effectiveness? Can this gap be bridged?
- What are the lessons learnt from efficiency research in the last years. Can any of these be carried across to effectiveness?
- Bearing in mind past research on effciency, sketch future directions for the field.
Program Committee:
- Alvaro Barreiro - University of A Coruña
- Christos Tryfonopoulos - Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
- Aristides Gionis - Yahoo! Research, Barcelona
- Ivana Podnar Zarko - FER, University of Zagreb
- Justin Zobel - NICTA, Australia
- Antonio Gulli - Ask.com
- Hugh Williams - Microsoft Corporation
- Massimo Coppola - ISTI/CNR
- Jie Lu - IBM Research
- Ranieri Baraglia - ISTI/CNR
- Raffaele Perego - ISTI/CNR
- Fidel Cacheda - University of A Coruña
- Diego Puppin - Google US
