HCIR 2012

The Sixth Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval took place on October 4 and 5, 2012 at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA. The 75 attendees hailed from 7 countries represented a cross-section of HCIR research and practice. Over a third of the attendees were from industry — including startups and large technology firms. We had a similar diversity of sponsors, benefiting from the generosity of FXPAL, IBM Research, LinkedIn, Mendeley, Microsoft Research, MIT CSAIL, and Oracle.

Our program consisted of a keynote by U.C. Berkeley professor Marti Hearst, 4 full papers, 5 short papers, 16 posters, and 5 HCIR Challenge presentations. There was also a reception at Technique.

This year's HCIR Challenge focused on the problem of people and expertise finding. We are grateful to Mendeley -- and in particular to William Gunn -- for providing this year's corpus: a database of over a million researcher profiles with associated metadata including published papers, academic status, disciplines, awards, and more taken from Mendeley's network of 1.6M+ researchers and 180M+ academic documents. The five competing teams built systems to enable efficient discovery of experts or expertise for applications such as collaborative research, team building, and competitive analysis. The winner of this year's HCIR Challenge was “Exposing and exploring academic expertise with Virtu”, by Luanne Freund and Kristof Kessler, Michael Huggett and Edie Rasmussen.

TOPICS

Topics for discussion and presentation at the symposium included:

• 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.

SYMPOSIUM ORGANIZERS

Robert Capra, UNC Chapel Hill

Gene Golovchinsky, FX Palo Alto Laboratory

Bill Kules, The Catholic University of America

Catherine Smith, Kent State University

Daniel Tunkelang, LinkedIn

Ryen White, Microsoft Research

SUPPORTERS