MKLab successfully organized the 10th European Summer School on Information Retrieval
The European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR) is a scientific event founded in 1990, which has given rise to a series of Summer Schools held on a regular basis to provide high quality teaching of Information Retrieval (IR) and advanced IR topics to an audience of researchers and research students. ESSIR is typically a week-long event consisting of guest lectures and seminars from invited lecturers who are recognized experts in the field.
The 10th European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR 2015) was held in Thessaloniki, Greece between August 31 and September 4, 2015 and was hosted by the Multimedia Knowledge and Social Media Analytics Laboratory (MKLab) of the Information Technologies Institute (ITI) at the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH).
The summer school programme consisted of a single-track lecture programme that offered high quality teaching on 13 topics in IR and related areas, including: (i) foundational topics that provided a broad overview of key concepts upon which the IR field is built, (ii) recent and emerging topics on the current and future developments in the field, and (iii) special topics on the inherently interdisciplinary nature of IR. Furthermore, the programme included a new edition of the Symposium on Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA), group activities, and a rich programme of social events and activities.
The school welcomed 51 participants, mainly postgraduate and doctoral students, with the majority coming from Europe, but there were also 3 students from the USA and Canada. Thanks to our generous sponsors, 25 scholarships covering the registration fees were offered to ESSIR 2015 participants: 22 scholarships were offered by the ELIAS (Evaluating Information Access Systems) ESF Research Networking Programme and 3 scholarships by the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR). The total number of attendees including participants, lecturers, organizers and volunteers was 81.
Both students and lecturers really enjoyed the summer school according to the results of an anonymous questionnaire that was circulated following the completion of the summer school. In particular, the 55.8% of the attendants gave an Excellent (5/5) overall rating to the summer school, 39.5% of them a “Very Good” (4/5) rating, and 4.7% a “Good” rating.
Photos and impressions from the event can be found on the ESSIR 2015 Facebook page.