Achievements

Today, Darío Garigliotti has successfully defended his PhD thesis on Task-Based Support in Search Engines. His opponents were Emine Yilmaz (University College London, UK) and Mathias Hagen (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany).
Congratulations Dr. Garigliotti!
[Thesis]

Today, Shuo Zhang has successfully defended his PhD thesis on Table Search, Generation and Completion. His opponents were Brian D. Davison (Lehigh University, USA) and Min Zhang, (Tsinghua Universty, China).
Congratulations Dr. Zhang!
[Thesis]

This year’s Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award was awarded to Krisztian Balog. He will give a keynote talk at ECIR 2019 in Cologne.

The SIGIR 2006 paper Formal Models for Expert Finding in Enterprise Corpora by Krisztian Balog, Leif Azzopardi, and Maarten de Rijke was awarded with a Test of Time Honorable Mention Award at this year’s SIGIR conference. The paper has over 680 citations according to Google Scholar at the time of writing. (Fun fact: this was Krisztian’s very first SIGIR paper.)

On March 12, Faegheh Hasibi successfully defended her PhD thesis “Semantic Search with Knowledge Bases”. Congratulations Dr. Hasibi!
[Thesis|Photos]

Our short paper on the DBpedia-Entity v2 test collection by Hasibi et al. has received the Best Short Paper Honorable Mention Award at the SIGIR’17 conference. [PDF|GitHub]

At the department’s annual Christmas party, Krisztian Balog was presented with the prestigious “Årets IDE-er” (“Employee of the department”) award.

Our team (Darío Garigliotti and Krisztian Balog) achieved top performance at the Task Understanding task of the TREC 2016 Tasks track.

Our paper “Exploiting Entity Linking in Queries for Entity Retrieval” by Faegheh Hasibi, Krisztian Balog, and Svein Erik Bratsberg won the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at the 2nd ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2016).