NOTE: In 2016, the HCIR Symposium and the Information Interaction in Context (IIiX) conferences were merged to create the Conference on Human Information Interaction & Retrieval (CHIIR). Please visit http://chiir.org/.

Human-computer Information Retrieval (HCIR) combines research from the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and information retrieval (IR), placing an emphasis on human involvement in search activities.

The HCIR Symposium (formerly known as the "HCIR Workshop") ran annually from 2007 to 2013. The event united academic researchers and industrial practitioners working at the intersection of HCI and IR to develop more sophisticated models, tools, and evaluation metrics to support activities such as interactive information retrieval and exploratory search. It provided an opportunity for attendees to informally share ideas via posters, small group discussions and selected short talks.

Participants presented interfaces (including mockups, prototypes, and other early-stage designs), research results from user studies of interfaces, and system demonstrations related to the intersection of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Retrieval (IR). The intent of the event was not primarily archival publication, but rather to provide a forum to build community and to stimulate discussion, new insight, and experimentation on search interface design.

Topics included, but were not limited to:

• Novel interaction techniques for information retrieval.
• Modeling and evaluation of interactive information retrieval.
• Exploratory search and information discovery.
• Information visualization and visual analytics.
• Applications of HCI techniques to information retrieval needs in specific domains.
• Ethnography and user studies relevant to information retrieval and access.
• Scale and efficiency considerations for interactive information retrieval systems.
• Relevance feedback and active learning approaches for information retrieval.
• Context-aware and social search.

The HCIR Symposium steering committee comprised:

• Rob Capra, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Bill Kules, The Catholic University of America
• Gene Golovchinsky, FXPAL
• Catherine Smith, Kent State University
• Daniel Tunkelang, Independent
• Ryen White, Microsoft Research