HCIR 2011

The Fifth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval took place all day on Thursday, October 20th, 2011, at Google's main campus in Mountain View, California. The event attracted about a hundred participants.

We are very pleased that our keynote speaker this year was Gary Marchionini, Dean of the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We had 14 paper presentations (6 long paper and 8 short papers) and 28 posters. See the SIGIR Forum workshop report for a detailed summary of the event.

We were also excited to continue the HCIR Challenge, this year focusing on the problem of information availability, where the seeker faces uncertainty as to whether the information of interest is available at all. The corpus was the CiteSeer digital library of scientific literature, which contains over 750,000 documents and provides rich meta-data about documents, authors, and citations.

FORMAT: THREE SUBMISSION CATEGORIES

This year we invited three types of papers: position papers, research papers and challenge reports.

• Position papers were judged by members of the organizing committee, based on relevance to HCIR. Idea diversity across all submissions was also be considered.
• Research papers were peer-reviewed and judged for both research quality and their likelihood to stimulate discussion. Reviewers recommended papers for oral presentation.
• Challenge reports were reviewed by the organizing committee, based on how well they addressed the challenge criteria. Reviewers selected challenge systems for demonstration at the workshop, where a winner will be determined live by the attending participants.

Acceptance of a position paper, research paper, or challenge report earned the author(s) admission to the workshop and the opportunity to present a poster.

Possible topics for discussion and presentation at the workshop 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.

Demonstrations of systems and prototypes were particularly welcome.

REGISTRATION

Thanks to generous contributions made by Google, Microsoft Research, Kent State University, and Endeca, there was be no registration fee for HCIR this year.

STUDENT TRAVEL AWARDS

We were pleased to be able to offer a limited number of student travel awards based on the generous contributions of Microsoft Research and Endeca. More information is available on the student travel awards page on this website.

IP&M SPECIAL ISSUE

We are guest co-editing a dedicated special topic issue of Information Processing & Management (IP&M), focused on research at the intersection of human-computer interaction and information retrieval. HCIR Workshop participants are encouraged to submit an article describing their presented research in significantly expanded form. Click here for details.

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Robert Capra, UNC Chapel Hill

Gene Golovchinsky, FX Palo Alto Laboratory

Bill Kules, The Catholic University of America

Dan Russell, Google

Catherine Smith, Kent State University

Daniel Tunkelang, LinkedIn

Ryen White, Microsoft Research

SUPPORTERS