Objectives of SWIRL:

SWIRL (Student Workshop for Information Retrieval and Language) is intended to serve as an informal forum for graduate students to meet and discuss their research in any of the following or related areas:

  1. Information retrieval

  2. Natural Language Processing

  3. Machine Learning (for text)

  4. Question Answering

  5. Summarization

  6. HCI / User Interfaces

       

Students from member universities visit each others schools/labs, give talks in the host's department and meet and discuss research with other faculty and students in the above mentioned areas. The host university can pick a topic of interest (depending on the focus their department/lab) and invite other schools to participate.

Participation Guidelines:

    Who can participate:

    If you are a graduate student and are involved in research that fits the objectives of SWIRL, would like to visit the other member schools and do not mind hosting graduate students from the other member schools you are welcome to join us. As of now we have no rules by which we decide who visits whom, except a desire from graduate students from one school to visit another school and a willingness of the latter to play host. Also guests may visit multiple member schools located near each other if possible.  Dates, number of visitors and other such logistic details are also flexible and depend on the convenience of the parties involved.

  There are also no strict guidelines about how the visits should be conducted. Interest and willingness are the only requirements. We have no designated source of funding. For each visit that we have arranged so far, we have been finding funding on the fly.

    Host site guidelines:

  1. Arrange for the guests to give talks (length, number of talks etc not fixed) in the host's department and meet with faculty and students in the department.

  2. If possible sponsor lunch/dinner.

  3. In case an overnight stay is involved students at the host site need to arrange to put up the guests either at their own homes or at a hotel depending on availability of  funding at the hosts site.

    Guest site guidelines:

    As of now guests fund their own travel to and from the host site.

Current Members:

University Contact Person
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Jaime Teevan (teevan@csail.mit.edu)
University of Massachusetts Amherst Hema Raghavan (hema@cs.umass.edu)

 

Schedule and Talks:

Date Location Speaker Info
11/09/2004 Umass-Amherst
  1. Jaime Teevan 
  2. Jason Rennie
  3. Percy Liang
11/22/2004 MIT
  1. Hema Raghavan:
  2. Vanessa Murdock:
  3. Fernando Diaz:
02/15/2005 UMass-Amherst
  1. Razvan Steve Bot
02/15/2005 UMass-Amherst
  1. Oren Kurland

Last updated: 11/23/2004 08:44 AM -0500