Several weeks ago, I announced that I’d be organizing the Industry Track at SIGIR ‘09. Some of you offered helpful suggestions, and many people expressed excitement at this opportunity to bring together the too-often separate worlds of research and practice.
Today, I am proud to share more details about the Industry Track. It will take place during the regular conference program, on Wednesday, July 22nd. Everyone who signs up for the full conference program (July 19th – 23rd) will be allowed to attend the Industry Track sessions at no extra charge. There will also be a one-day registration option.
But the reason you’ll want to be there is the incredible set of people who will be presenting during this full-day event:
- Matt Cutts, Head of Google’s Webspam team
- danah boyd, Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
- Vanja Josifovski, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research
- Thomas Tague, Leader for the Calais initiative at Thomson Reuters
- Tip House, Chief Architect of WorldCat at the OCLC
We will also have a pair of panels devoted to enterprise search:
- A panel of senior technologists from the leading enterprise search vendors: Autonomy, Endeca, and FAST. It will be moderated by Elizabeth Liddy, dean and Trustee Professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and director of the Center for Natural Language Processing.
- A panel of leading industry analysts and consultants who cover enterprise search. These will include Sue Feldman from IDC, Theresa Regli from CMS Watch, and a third analyst to be announced shortly.
For researchers, the Industry Track provides an opportunity to learn about the industry side of information retrieval from some of its leading lights. In particular, it brings together the major players from both web search and enterprise search.
For industry practitioners who may never have heard of SIGIR before, let alone attended one of its conferences, the Industry Track offers an unprecedented opportunity to learn about the science and technology of information retrieval in a vendor-neutral, analyst-neutral setting. All without paying an extortionary registration fee.
Finally, for everyone in the space, this is an incredible professional networking opportunity. I look forward to seeing you there!
