Approaches to Research in IR
Abstract: In this lecture, I will attempt to convey lessons learned from 40 years of working with graduate students doing research in information retrieval. I will start by giving a brief overview of IR research, focusing on the historical context, the characteristics that make IR unique, and what distinguishes good IR research. I will then cover a variety of areas that are important for IR research, including how to choose a research topic, what to publish, where to publish, and how to present the research. I will use some of our current CIIR projects as examples for this discussion. Although the lecture is aimed at graduate students, the material should be useful for researchers both in academia and industry.
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Short Bio: W. Bruce Croft is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), and Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is an ACM Fellow and has received four lifetime achievement awards for his research, including the Gerard Salton Award from ACM SIGIR. Five of his papers have received SIGIR Test of Time Awards and another three received honorable mentions. His Google h-index is currently 103.