Panel on Teaching and Learning IR in Academia and Industry

Abstract: The European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR) is a scientific event established in 1990 that promotes a series of Summer Schools which provide high-quality training on Information Retrieval, covering advanced topics. ESSIR was started at a time that proved especially favorable for Information Retrieval. In fact, the Schools of Cornell University in the USA (headed by Gerard Salton) and Cambridge University (with Karen Spark Jones, Steve Robertson, and Keith van Rijsbergen) in Europe paved the way for a new discipline which started flourishing in the 1980s to emerge globally as an independent area of computer science. While the discipline was rapidly growing from a methodology perspective – with search engines being designed and implemented once the Web was invented – its teaching within university curricula did not move on as swiftly. For years ESSIR has helped fill this gap, preparing students in researching Information Retrieval. As the situation rapidly evolved over the years, the discipline has grown significantly and has had to face diversified issues. The panel of the Summer School will, therefore, be centered on what, those who are starting scientific research, need in terms of methodological and cultural background.

Download here the slides of the panel


Panelists:

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, NTENT / Northeastern University, USA

W. Bruce Croft, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA

Diane Kelly, University of Tennessee, USA

Henning Müller, HES-SO Valais, Switzerland


Panel Moderator:

Maristella Agosti

Short Bio: Maristella Agosti is Professor of Computer Engineering in the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Italy, where she leads the Information Management Systems research group. She is member of the Galilean Academy, Class of Mathematical and Natural Sciences. Her research focuses on information retrieval and digital libraries. She has worked in ICT research for more than 35 years, edited 18 books and published over 200 articles in journals and conference proceedings. She has been and is involved in a number of research projects, funded by EU, MIUR, CNR and other funding bodies. She is or has been principal investigator or senior researcher of several European Commission research projects including EXAMODE, CULTURA, PREFORMA, PROMISE, EuropeanaConnect, TrebleCLEF, TELplus, SAPIR, DELOS, and IDOMENEUS. She contributed to design and launched the ESSIR summer school series in information retrieval in 1990. In 2016, she received the Tony Kent Strix Award.