Tietopisto No 15 (Finnish newspaper) on 4 October 2001


translation:

Engineers and humanists strive together towards controlling the flood of information

A three-day workshop on information retrieval attracted interest among an international group of researchers

The Internet already contains so much information that the amount of data cannot be controlled by anybody or any system. The present search methods are insufficient for precise and efficient information retrieval. Since the Internet contains for example an enormous number of commercial pages with advertisements, it is difficult - if not impossible - to use the existing search engines for finding reliable real-time information.

Research aiming towards the development of new kinds of search methods is one of the important focuses in information technology today: also the general public must be offered better and more efficient retrieval methods, with which to separate relevant and irrelevant information.

As part of global research and development, an international workshop on information retrieval titled IR 2001 was arranged at the University of Oulu between September 19th and 21st. The event attracted about 100 researchers or otherwise interested people from more than ten different countries, and they included both technical developers of information retrieval and people working with content. The workshop concentrated especially on semantic information retrieval models, categorisation, indexing and retrieval of different media types, user interfaces, data visualisation, digital libraries, and system architectures as well as applications.

According to Professor Tapio Seppanen, member of IR 2001 Program Committee, the popularity of the workshop was amazing, and more papers were sent for evaluation than were expected.

Interdisciplinary goals

The keynote speakers for the workshop were leading experts in the field: Professors Peter Ingwersen (Royal School of Library and Information Science) from Denmark and Alan F. Smeaton (Dublin City University) from Ireland. The third keynote speaker, Howard Wactlar (Carnegie Mellon University), was forced to cancel his appearance due to travelling difficulties caused by the terrorist attack against the United States.

Professor Smeaton's keynote speech was about Físchlár, a web-based digital video system developed in Dublin City University, while Ingwersen talked about the cognitive perspectives of document representations for interactive information retrieval.

A total of 21 scientific presentations were given in the workshop, divided under six different topic areas. On the first day of the workshop, both keynote speakers held four-hour tutorials for the other participants. The tutorials concentrated on two wide specialty areas: users in the context and information retrieval techniques on non-text media.

The best paper and the best student paper were awarded in the workshop. The paper selected as the best of all had been written by Jacques Robin and Franklin de Souza from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Brazil and it was titled Empirically evaluating WordNet-based query expansion in a web search engine setting. The best student paper was titled Shape matching with occlusion in image databases and written by Aristeidis Diplaros, Euripides G.M. Petrakis, and Evangelos Milios, all Greeks.

"The point of the workshop was to think about solutions for information retrieval from the viewpoints of both engineers and humanists. The goal in the event was to give rise to fruitful discussion between disciplines, and this we also managed to do," says Tapio Seppanen.

The workshop also included extensive leisure activities: the guests had a chance to visit for example the Tietomaa Science Centre in Oulu as well as the National Park of Oulanka.

The main sponsor for the IR 2001 workshop was Infotech Oulu, and the practical arrangements were made by MediaTeam Oulu and MVIS, both of which are research groups in the Infotech.



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