Information Retrieval for Climate Impact
A SIGIR 2024 workshop
Climate change is a far-reaching, global phenomenon that will impact many aspects of our society. The evidence base for observed climate impacts is expanding, and the wider climate literature is growing exponentially. Systematic reviews and systematic maps offer structured ways to collectively identify and describe this evidence while maintaining transparency, attempting to ensure comprehensiveness and reduce bias.
The primary theme of the MANILA24 workshop is Information Retrieval for Climate Impact. The purpose of the workshop is to provide a venue for discussing and compiling a research agenda for information retrieval for climate impact. The IPCC Working Group II assesses the impacts of climate change, from a world-wide to a regional view of ecosystems and biodiversity, and of humans and their diverse societies, cultures and settlements. MANILA24 will bring together researchers, applied researchers, and practitioners in climate impact, information retrieval, and systematic reviews to gain a broader understanding of the information retrieval challenges faced in climate impact in general and by the IPCC Working Group II in particular. We aim to foster collaboration, discussion, and create broader awareness in the IR community of the unique challenges posed by the climate impact domain.
Format
The MANILA24 workshop will be a half-day workshop organized as part of the SIGIR 2024 workshop program. The emphasis will be on discussion, not simply a mini-conference but a dynamic sharing of ideas. The workshop will be organized along four areas of interest: (i) Information needs in climate impact; (ii) Search and analysis of formal literature for climate impact; (iii) Search and analysis of informal publications for climate impact; and (iv) Resources to support IR for climate impact.
The workshop will start with four invited talks about the four areas of interest listed above, each of 10 to 15 minutes, delivered by colleagues whose work is centered around issues related to each of these topics.
This will be followed by lightning talks and/or a poster session where participants present relevant recent or ongoing work. To this end we welcome extended abstracts of 2–4 pages (see below), and the specific presentation format (e.g., poster vs. short presentations) will depend on the number of submissions we receive.
These presentations will be followed by a breakout session aimed at formulating more in-depth agendas for each of the four areas, as well as identifying potential tensions and/or dependencies between them.
The participants will then get back together to report, and conclude with specific and actionable research agendas for each of the four lines.
Your contributions
The purpose of the workshop is to identify gaps in the technical emerging work on IR for Climate Impact, including undertheorized and underspecified issues related to each of the four areas of focus. We aim to create actionable technical research agendas for each of them. To this end, we welcome technical contributions and position papers as extended abstracts (2-4 pages) on a wide range of topics related to information retrieval for climate impact, including:
Information needs in climate impact,
Search and analysis of formal literature for climate impact,
Search and analysis of informal publications for climate impact, and
Resources to support IR for climate impact
Recent work on very large-scale systematic reviews, such as https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01168-6, on climate language models, such as https://arxiv.org/pdf/2401.09646.pdf, and on geolocated literature with climate information such as https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.06817 is obviously relevant.
How to submit
Abstracts submitted to MANILA24 should be in English, in PDF, and formatted using the standard ACM sigconf format (using \documentclass[sigconf, natbib=true, anonymous=false]{acmart}). The review process is single-blind. MANILA24 uses EasyChair to handle submissions: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=manila24.
Proceedings
No official proceedings will be published.
Organizers
Chairs
Bart van den Hurk (IPCC Working Group II; Deltares Water Knowledge Institute)
Maarten de Rijke (ICAI; University of Amsterdam)
Flora Salim (UNSW Sydney)
Program committee
Max Callaghan (Mercator Research Institute)
Renato Calzone (Ilustre Lab on Sustainable AI)
Winston Chow (Singapore Management University)
Ian T. Foster (University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory)
Maria Heuss (University of Amsterdam)
Sanaa Hobeichi (UNSW Sydney)
Evangelos Kanoulas (University of Amsterdam)
Ana Lucic (Microsoft Research)
Tanwi Mallick (Argonne National Laboratory)
Veruska Muccione (University Zürich)
Shruti Nath (University of Oxford)
Anne Sietsma (Wageningen University and Research Centre)
Damiano Spina (RMIT)
Georgios Tsatsaronis (Elsevier)
Timeline
May 9, 2024 (AOE): Extended abstracts due
May 23, 2024 (AOE): Notifications
July 18, 2024: Workshop at SIGIR 2024
December 1, 2024: Submission of the Information Retrieval for Climate Impact Agenda for publication in SIGIR Forum