Yahoo! Research's Big Impact at SIGIR

Search experts from around the world, including more than a dozen representatives from Yahoo! Research, descended on Amsterdam late last month for the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference.

SIGIR is the premier international forum for the presentation of new research and systems in the field of information retrieval. This year’s conference was more popular than ever, with some 600 people from 30-plus countries in attendance.

"I have been to quite a few SIGIRs, and this year was one of the best," says Yahoo! Research scientist Hugo Zaragoza.

What made the event so special? All told, Yahoo! presented four tutorials, nine papers, three posters, and three workshops.

The conference also had more web-related papers than ever before, mostly coming from Yahoo! Research and Microsoft Research. For example, this was one of the first SIGIR conferences with two research track papers on web advertising, both given by Vanja Josifovski of Yahoo! Research. "He gave excellent presentations," says Zaragoza.

And, of course, there was a rocking party at the NEMO Science Center hosted by Yahoo! Research, a Gold Sponsor of this year’s conference. The more than 100 partygoers were treated to drinks served in test-tubes. There were also plenty of games, including an action-packed round of video-tag with prizes for the winners. "The party was a complete success," says Baeza-Yates

Attendees were also thrilled with the conference venue: the historic Hotel Krasnapolsky located at the center of Amsterdam’s web of canals. Rumor has it that the Yahoo! crowd took full advantage of the night life scene, with Baeza-Yates getting his groove on until the wee hours at one of the hip Amsterdam dance clubs.

Back at the conference, the Yahoo! Research team presented a number of well-received tutorials. Zaragoza, together with Stephen Robertson of Microsoft Research, gave a tutorial on Probabilistic Relevance Model, which had the highest number of registered attendees. He also presented two papers and was a panelist on the "Learning to Rank" workshop, which presented some exciting new ranking results.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Andrei Broder, and Prabhakar Raghavan delivered a tutorial entitled Introduction to Web Retrieval and Advertising. And Baeza-Yates, along with Sihem Amer-Yahia, gave another tutorial called XML Retrieval: Integrated IR-DB Challenges and Solutions.

Yahoo! Research also presented nine papers including: Know your Neighbors: Web Spam Detection using the Web Topology by Carlos Castillo, Debora Donato, Aristides Gionis, Vanessa Murdock, and Fabrizio Silvestri; The Impact of Caching on Search Engines by Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Aristides Gionis, Flavio Junqueira, Vanessa Murdock, Vassilis Plachouras, and Fabrizio Silvestri; and Robust Classification of Rare Queries Using Web Knowledge by Andrei Broder, Marcus Fontoura, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Amruta Joshi, Vanja Josifovski, and Tong Zhang.

Finally, Yahoo! researchers organized three full-day workshops that took place in conjunction with the conference. Roelof van Zwol led the workshop on Multimedia Information Retrieval, which focused on new challenges in audio-visual search.

Flavio Junqueira and Vassilis Plachouras helped organize the workshop on Large-scale Distributed Systems for Information Retrieval, bringing together researchers interested in the design and implementation of information retrieval systems.

And Benjamin Piwowarski co-led the workshop entitled Information Retrieval and Applications of Graphical Models, which provided an open forum for researchers to display their innovative graphic model applications.

Needless to say, Yahoo! Research made a huge splash at this year’s SIGIR conference, and the entire organization is eagerly anticipating next year’s event in Singapore.