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DESIRES (Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems) is a systems-oriented conference, complementary in its mission to the mainstream Information Access and Retrieval conferences like SIGIR, ECIR, and other symposiums focusing on specific aspects of IR such as ICTIR or CHIIR, emphasizing the innovative technological aspects of search and retrieval systems.
DESIRES gathers researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to discuss the latest innovative and visionary ideas in the field. The goal of this new conference is to provide the IR community with a venue for presenting innovative search systems architectures, as well as a publication opportunity. DESIRES does not compete with the established conferences presenting rigorous treatises in established areas; rather its goal is to air radically new ideas.
DESIRES mainly encourages papers about innovative and risky information access and retrieval system ideas, systems-building experience and insight, resourceful experimental studies, provocative position statements, new application domains. DESIRES also welcomes contributions focusing on implementation details, successful or failed reproducibility attempts, technological breakthroughs, and new uses of old ideas.
Traditionally, program committees in our IR field reward scholarship on narrow ideas, operate by consensus, discard “loosey-goosey” papers including half-baked ideas and submissions that resemble war stories from the field. The major IR conferences usually reject such submissions because they are not scientific. However, these are often the very papers that ofer long-term value to the field and should be widely disseminated. DESIRES values innovation, experience-based insight, and vision.
DESIRES is a single-track conference and there are three kinds of contributions:
Research papers Papers usually lack rigorous frameworks, simulations of performance, or prototype implementations but present a radical departure from conventional approaches that enables new applications.
Prototypes The prototype descriptions generally are a detailed report on successes and mistakes.
Abstracts Ideas that are too half-baked for a paper or demo proposal are good candidates for an abstract.
DESIRES will run every other year in a retreat-like fashion (around the time of the European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR)); ESSIR runs on odd years, DESIRES on even years. These proceedings contain the full papers and short papers selected for presentation at the First Biennial Conference on Design of Experimental Search & Information REtrieval Systems (DESIRES 2018). 1 The event is organized under the Bertinoro international Center for informatics (BiCi) 2 umbrella. BiCi is an association whose mission is to foster cutting-edge research and advanced education in Computer Science. The conference was held from August 28 to August 31, 2018, at the University Residential Centre of Bertinoro (Ce.U.B.) 3 in Bertinoro, Italy.
DESIRES looked for original work that could not be submitted in parallel to another venue. DESIRES is a single-track conference focused on discussion. In order to encourage authors to submit only their best work, each person could be an author or co-author of only a single full paper.
Full papers presented at DESIRES may lack rigorous frameworks, simulations of performance, or traditional evaluations but present a radical departure from conventional approaches that enables new applications.
Abstracts present ideas that are still in early stages for a full paper or challenge the current trends in IR. Any author of a full paper could additionally submit one abstract. Abstracts have a single author and were presented in a gong-show style. DESIRES received a total of 33 submissions in two categories: 20 full papers and 13 abstracts.
All full papers were reviewed by at least three members of an international Program Committee formed by experts from industry and academia. Of the full papers submitted to the conference, 13 were accepted for oral presentation. All the the abstracts were reviewed by at least two reviewers and they were all accepted to be presented to the conference. The accepted contributions represent the state of the art in information retrieval, cover a diverse range of topics, propose new uses for IR techniques, querying, personal search, expert search, visual systems, IR research tools, teaching in IR, evaluation, NLP and collaborative search.
There were 49 unique authors with papers or abstracts accepted at DESIRES 2018 with the following geographical distribution (afiliation): 12 authors from the USA (24.5%), 9 authors from Germany (18%), 7 authors from the UK (14%), 7 authors from The Netherlands (14%), 5 authors from Australia (10%), 4 authors from Italy (8%), 2 authors from Qatar (4%) and one author from France, Sweden and Switzerland (2%).
There are three keynotes: 1http://desires.dei.unipd.it/ 2http://www.bici.eu/index.html 3http://www.ceub.it/?lang=en
There is one industry panel. The goal of the panel is to discuss topics that are of importance in industrial settings and may not be of significance in academia. Moreover, another goal is to examine problems, emergent trends, and their implications for the future of the field.
The speakers of the panel are: • Emre Kiciman, Microsoft • David Lewis, Cyxtera • Mark Najork, Google • Tony Russel Rose, UXLabs
DESIRES 2018 has been held under the patronage of the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padua.
Finally, DESIRES 2018 would have not been possible without the financial support from Bloomberg (silver sponsor) and Google (bronze sponsor).
DESIRES has been conceived by the general chairs with the support and suggestions of the advisory board.
Advisory board members have been selected amongst the top senior members of the IR community seeking for balance between industry and academia. We thanks the advisory board members for their work and contribution to the conference.
We thank all Program Committee members for their time and efort in ensuring the high quality of the DESIRES 2018 program.