From July 24 to July 28, scientists from Yahoo Labs locations all over the world traveled to Beijing, China, to attend the 34th annual international ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2011) Conference. The conference focuses on areas including information storage, retrieval and dissemination with emphasis on research strategies, output schemes and system evaluations. Yahoo Labs contributed more than 20 papers, posters, presentations and workshops. Yahoo Labs was also awarded the Best Student Paper and received 2 Honorable Mentions for papers. The Best Student Paper went to “Collaborative Competitive Filtering: Learning Recommender using Context of User Choice” by Shuang-Hong Yang, Bo Long, Alexander J. Smola, Hongyuan Zha and Zhaohui Zheng. Their research and subsequent paper looked beyond Collaborative Filtering (CF) and proposed Collaborative Competitive Filtering (CCF), a framework for learning user preferences by modeling the choice process in recommender systems. Scientists Elad Yom-Tov and Fernando Diaz received an Honorable Mention for their paper “Out of Sight, Not Out of Mind: On the Effect of Social and Physical Detachment on Information Need.” They found through examining search engine queries that information needs of people are often influenced by their social level and physical location. This theory’s observation’s validity becomes even more apparent during natural disasters when time and place are especially important. The second Honorable Mention went to scientists Roi Blanco and Peter Mika for their paper “Repeatable and Reliable Search System Evaluation using Crowdsourcing,” in which they address the reliability and longevity of crowd-sourced evaluations. The conference drew a larger-than-usual crowd, and several papers and topics covered time-sensitive information retrieval. Another important theme this year was the user. There were papers on user modeling, interaction measurement, long-term engagement, and education.