News

Follow Hamed Zamani (@HamedZamani) on Twitter to get descriptions of our new IR papers.

During the February 2025 Computing Research Association (CRA) Board of Directors meeting, CIIR Director James Allan was elected Chair of the CRA Board of… more

Of the sixty invited participants at the 4th Strategic Workshop on Information RetrievaL (SWIRL IV) held in Torquay, Australia on February 9 – 12, 2025, nine attendees were current and former CIIR researchers.

A new book, Information Access in the Era of Generative AI, edited by Ryen W. White and former CIIR grad student Chirag Shah was recently published. This is the latest book to be… more

CIIR doctoral student Alireza Salemi and Associate Director Hamed Zamani, Associate Professor of CICS, introduce a method to to evaluate the reliability of AI-generated searches. Their … more

CIIR Director James Allan and Associate Director Hamed Zamani, along with UT Austin’s Eunsol Choi, organized a two-day visioning workshop, “… more

The CIIR Talk Series videos topped 10,000 views on its YouTube channel. The Series, hosted by CIIR Associate Director Hamed Zamani, is an initiative… more

In September 2024, the National Science Foundation announced a new $20 million NSF-Simons AI Institute for… more

CIIR doctoral student Alireza Salemi and Associate Professor Hamed Zamani received the Best Short Paper Award at the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024) for their paper, "… more

The CIIR organized a reunion held on July 17, 2024 in Washington D.C. during SIGIR 2024. Over 30 current and former members of the CIIR were in attendance for this reception.

Bruce Croft, former CIIR Director and Distinguished Professor Emeritus, was recognized in the 2024 Research.com's rankings of Best Computer Science Scientists. Dr. Croft… more

The UMass Board of Trustees voted on June 7, 2024 to award tenure to CIIR Associate Director Hamed Zamani who also… more

Kumo.ai was named to the 2024 Forbes AI 50 list which recognizes the most promising… more

CIIR professors, James Allan, Negin Rahimi, and Hamed Zamani, participated in the Symposium on Information Interaction and Learning that was held at the… more

Razieh (Negin) Rahimi accepted an assistant professor position within the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS). Prior to this promotion to tenure-track faculty effective in January 2024, Dr. Rahimi was a Research Assistant… more

CIIR researchers will present six papers and two workshops at the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024) in Washington, D.C. in July. SIGIR is the premier international forum for… more

CIIR Director and CICS Associate Dean of Research and Engagement James Allan was reelected to the Computing Research Association (CRA) Board of Directors for a 3-year term. He has been a CRA board member since 2018, and treasurer and executive… more

Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Assistant Professor Negin Rahimi received a $599,916 CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her project,… more

CIIR Director and CICS Associate Dean of Research and Engagement James Allan joined Vice Provost for Global Affairs Kalpen Trivedi to represent UMass Amherst as one of 17 U.S. college and university delegations selected to visit India to discuss… more

In attendance at "An evening with Chancellor Javier Reyes," a number of CIIR alums gathered with CIIR Director James Allan for a photo. This UMass Amherst social event was held in San Jose, CA on January 24, 2024.… more

CIIR Director and CICS Professor James Allan was named the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences Associate Dean of Research and Engagement, effective January 2024.

The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) hosted a Brainstorming Session on “Information Retrieval (IR) Research in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI)” that was held on December 1 – 2, 2023 at UMass Amherst. CIIR… more

In December, CICS Dean Laura Haas announced that Dan Parker was selected for the 2023 College Outstanding Staff Award. In addition to being an integral part of the CIIR as the Center's Lab Manager since joining in 2009, Dan was chosen for this… more

Four CIIR doctoral students, Zhiqi Huang, Youngwoo Kim, Yen-Chieh Lien, and Puxuan Yu, received Spring 2024 Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences… more

Assistant Professor and CIIR Associate Director Hamed Zamani is quoted in an article in Science, "As scientists face a flood of papers… more

The book, Conversational Informational Seeking, authored by CIIR Associate Director and Assistant Professor Hamed Zamani, Johanne R. Trippas of RMIT, CIIR Ph.D. alum Jeff Dalton of… more

CIIR Alum Shiri Dori-Hacohen (Ph.D. '17) was named to Diversability's 2023 D-30 Disability Impact List for her advocacy for neurodiversity and research on fairness via artificial… more

CIIR Associate Director and CICS Assistant Professor Hamed Zamani was selected as the recipient of the ACM SIGIR 2023 Early Career Excellence in Research Award and the ACM SIGIR 2023 Excellence in Community Engagement Award. Prof. Zamani… more

At the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2023), co-authors Alireza Salemi (CIIR doctoral student), Juan Altmayer Pizzorno (UMass Amherst… more

CIIR Associate Director and CICS Assistant Professor Hamed Zamani received an AI and the New Future of Work Award from Microsoft for his… more

CIIR Alum Jeff Dalton (PhD '14) was named a Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Dalton joined the Univ. of… more

The CIIR hosted our first Learning and Language Technologies Symposium on May 4, 2023. James Allan, Negin Rahimi, and Hamed Zamani were joined by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill faculty researchers Jaime Arguello and Rob Capra in… more

Hamed Zamani, Manning CICS Assistant Professor and CIIR Associate Director, received an… more

CIIR researchers will present seven papers and one workshop at the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2023) in July in Taipei. SIGIR is… more

A UMass Amherst Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) team, led by Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) doctoral student Chris Samarinas and advised by Assistant Professor Hamed Zamani, is one of ten teams… more

Four CIIR doctoral students received Spring 2023 Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences Writing Fellowships. Ali Montazeralghaem and Shahrzad Naseri received CICS Dissertation Writing Fellowships, and Zhiqi Huang and Puxuan Yu… more

Established in September 1992, the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) celebrated its 30th anniversary this Fall.

Congratulations to CIIR alums Michael Bendersky, Chirag Shah, Matt Lease, and CICS professor Gerome Miklau for being named to the 2022 class of ACM Distinguished… more

At the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2022), CIIR researchers Bruce Croft, Hamed Zamani, and Hansi Zeng received awards for papers that they co-authored.

The SIGIR 2022… more

Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Assistant Professor Hamed Zamani received a CAREER Award of $570,863 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his project,… more

Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences Research Assistant Professor Razieh (Negin) Rahimi was selected for a 2022 Google Research Scholar Award for her work on generative rankers toward trustworthy search result diversification. She… more

Julian Killingback was selected as a Fellow candidate for the 2022 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). Killingback, a UMass Amherst Manning CICS master's degree student who will… more

It is with sadness that we announce that Dr. Dirk Mahling passed away on March 18, 2022 at the age of 61 following a battle with sarcoma. Dr. Mahling received his UMass Amherst Computer Science PhD in 1990 (advised by Distinguished Professor… more

CIIR Associate Director and Assistant Professor Hamed Zamani was selected to present keynote addresses at two workshops held during the 15th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Minig (WSDM'22). At the ACM WSDM'22… more

CIIR doctoral student Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar received a UMass Amherst Graduate School Spring 2022 Dissertation Completion Fellowship… more

CIIR doctoral student Hamed Bonab was selected to receive a Spring 2022 Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences Dissertation Writing Fellowship.

Bonab, who was admitted to doctoral candidacy with distinction and defended his… more

CIIR doctoral student Helia Hashemi received a 2021-2022 Bloomberg Data Science PhD Fellowship. Hashemi, advised by… more

CIIR/Manning CICS Phd ('07) alum Donald Metzler was named a 2021 Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for outstanding… more

The paper, "AutoTriggER:Named Entity Recognition with Auxiliary Trigger Extraction," by CIIR doctoral student Sheikh M. Sarwar, CIIR Director James Allan, and co-… more

A team of UMass CICS / CIIR researchers was among 10 teams selected to compete in this year’s prestigious … more

CIIR authors will have ten papers presented during the 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2021) being held virtually in July. CICS… more

CIIR/CICS Phd (2019) alum Qingyao Ai is a recipient of a Google 2021 Research Scholar Program Award. He is one of 77 awardees in the inaugural year of the… more

CIIR Director James Allan, CICS professor and chair of the faculty, was re-elected treasurer of the Computing Research Association (CRA) Executive Committee. His second two-year term begins on July 1, 2021.… more

Effective January 2021, Professor James Allan and Assistant Professor Hamed Zamani have taken on new leadership roles in the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) as Distinguished Professor Emeritus Bruce Croft has stepped down as… more

CIIR Director James Allan and former CIIR Assistant Director Jamie Callan were among five selected to the 2021 class of ACM SIGIR Academy inductees. They join former CIIR Director Bruce Croft who was selected to the ACM SIGIR Academy inaugural… more

The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval's (CIIR) Talk Series continues this Spring 2021 semester with researchers and practitioners speaking about their work on IR and related disciplines.… more

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, selected CIIR Director and Professor James Allan as a 2020 ACM Fellow. He is being recognized "for contributions to information… more

CIIR Director and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Bruce Croft has been named an IEEE Fellow, effective January 2021, for "contributions to information retrieval."

Professor James Allan was recently awarded a UMass Manning/IALS Innovation Grant for his work on developing tools “explaining contradictory… more

CIIR Phd alum Jeff Dalton, School of Computing Science faculty at the University of Glasgow, is a recipient of the prestigious Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship. Dr. Dalton is one of 15 selected in 2020 for the Fellowship which is named after… more

The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) announces a new CIIR Talk Series that brings in researchers and practitioners to speak about their work on IR and related disciplines. Starting… more

CIIR Director Bruce Croft and Assistant Professor Hamed Zamani each received Best Paper Awards at the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2020) held virtually in October 2020.

The CIKM 2020 Best… more

CICS Distinguished Professor and CIIR Director Bruce Croft was selected as an inaugural inductee to the ACM SIGIR Academy. According to the ACM SIGIR, this award honors and recognizes researchers "who have made significant, cumulative… more

Hamed Zamani (Ph.D. 2019) joins the CIIR at UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) as tenure track Assistant Professor in Computer Science in Fall 2020.… more

CIIR co-Director James Allan, CICS professor and chair of the faculty, received a 2019 Amazon Research Award for research on Explanation of… more

CIIR doctoral student Chen Qu was selected to receive one of the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Outstanding Graduate Awards for the 2019-2020 academic year.

CIIR/CICS doctoral student Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, CICS doctoral student Katherine Keith, and Andrew Halterman from MIT political science have received a Kaggle Open Data Research Grant for their project, "Semantic Role Annotations For Real-World… more

It is with great sadness that we announce that Michael Zarozinski passed away unexpectedly on December 9, 2019. Michael was a Senior Software Engineer who has been working in the CIIR (including IESL) since 2013. He will be greatly missed. More… more

Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) researchers within the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences are providing a dataset that consists of Swahili and Somali queries translated from the… more

At the ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2019) held in Santa Clara, CA in October, CIIR researchers received a best full paper award and a best short paper honorable mention.

CIIR doctoral… more

A number of our CIIR alums from the Silicon Valley gathered for an evening social with current CIIR researchers and CIIR alums who were attending ICTIR 2019 in Santa Clara, CA in October.

Pictured at the event: Front row (l. to r.):… more

Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) doctoral student Helia Hashemi is the primary developer of ANTIQUE (“Answering Non-facToId QUEstions), a large-scale non-factoid question answering collection that Google AI researchers chose… more

The UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences is currently seeking new faculty (Assistant/Associate Professor) in Information Retrieval to join the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval.… more

CIIR doctoral student Chen Qu is the first recipient of the W. Bruce Croft Graduate Scholarship in Computer Science. He received the scholarship in 2019.

During the CLEF 2019 (the 10th Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum), Distinguished Professor Emeritus Bruce Croft gave a keynote address on "The Relevance… more

During the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019), Distinguished Professor Bruce Croft gave a keynote address on "The… more

Shown are some of the CIIR alums (along with CIIR co-Director James Allan and current student Hamed Zamani) who gathered for a photo opp at SIGIR 2019. Pictured from left to right: Hamed Zamani, Anton Leuski, Laura Dietz, Elif Aktolga, James… more

CIIR doctoral alum Xing Yi ('11) and co-author James Allan, professor and CIIR co-Director, were honored with the Test of Time Award for their publication in 2009’s European Conference on… more

Doctoral students Su Lin Blodgett and Hamed Zamani (shown left to right) are this year's recipients of the Accomplishments in Search & AI Awards, sponsored by Microsoft. More details… more

The publication, "Unsupervised Explainable Controversy Detection from Online News," was awarded the Best Application Short Paper at the 41st European Conference on IR Research (ECIR 2019). The paper is authored by CIIR doctoral student Youngwoo… more

CIIR co-Director James Allan was elected treasurer of the Computing Research Association (CRA) Executive Committee for a two-year term starting on July 1. … more

Bob Cook, former CIIR managing software engineer, died unexpectedly on November 18, 2018 at the age of 57. More on Bob's life and career.
… more

The CIIR hosted an international UMass Amherst/Montreal Research IR Summit in September 2018 in Hadley, MA to bring together industry and academic researchers for future collaborations. Twenty-five researchers from Microsoft Research Montreal,… more

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Bruce Croft, together with CIIR doctoral students Daniel Cohen and Hamed Zamani, were selected to receive a 2018… more

A CIIR paper received the Best Short Paper Award at SIGIR 2018. The paper, "Cross Domain Regularization for Neural Ranking Models using Adversarial Learning," was co-authored by CIIR Doctoral student Daniel Cohen and Distinguished Emeritus… more

Distinguished Professor Bruce Croft is retiring this spring after spending his thirty-nine-year career on the computer science faculty at UMass Amherst. He is setting aside his faculty responsibilities to focus on research and on directing the… more

The 2018 ACM SIGIR Conference paper statistics show that CIIR authors are among the top producers of publications accepted at the conference to be held in Michigan in July.

Distinguished Professor Bruce Croft, CIIR Director, is #1 on the… more

CICS Professor and CIIR Co-Director James Allan is one of five newly elected members of the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Board of Directors. His term runs from July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2021.… more

Nine current and former CIIR faculty, students, and postdocs participated as part of a group of 61 researchers in the Third Strategic Workshop in Information Retrieval in Lorne (SWIRL), held in Lorne, Australia on February 13-16, 2018.

CICS professor and chair of the faculty, James Allan, co-director of the CIIR, is featured in a new video highlighting his work in information retrieval. Watch it here.

CICS professor and chair of the faculty, James Allan, co-director of the CIIR, is featured in a new video highlighting his work in information retrieval. Watch it here.

Professor James Allan, CIIR co-Director and Chair of the Faculty of the College of Information and Computer Sciences, was featured in the "CRA Board Member Highlight" article in the… more

The Microsoft BCS/BCS IRSG Karen Spärck Jones Award 2017 will be awarded to Fernando Diaz, Director of Research at Spotify. According to the KSJ award site, "Fernando has made major contributions in both IR and NLP is in the very spirit of the… more

The CIIR marks its 25th anniversary in September 2017. A CIIR history timeline was created to look back on the CIIR's 25 years. The CIIR is featured in an article in the CICS Significant Bits Fall 2017 newsletter (… more

Doctoral students (shown left to right) Qingyao Ai and Ari Kobren are this year's recipients of the College's Accomplishments in Search & Mining Awards, sponsored by Microsoft Research.

The paper, "A Markov random field model for term dependencies," by Donald Metzler (CIIR alum, Ph.D. '07) and Bruce Croft, presented at SIGIR 2005, was selected for the SIGIR 2017 Test of Time Award Honorable Mention. More on the SIGIR 2017 awards… more

In August 2017, Professor James Allan gave a lecture, "Extracting Knowledge from Big Data - Information Retrieval," for the Hokkaido Summer Institute (HSI) course held at Hokkaido University's Graduate School of Information Science and Technology… more

CIIR doctoral student, Hamed Zamani, was chosen as one of six ACM SIGIR Student Liaisons. Laura Deitz, the ACM SIGIR Student Affairs Chair, announced the students on July 26, 2017.

Former CIIR Assistant Director and CICS alum, Jamie Callan (Ph.D. '93) received an Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research during the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences 2017 Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy… more

The IR Lab gathered on November 4, 2016 for a research talk by Damiano Spina, a Research Fellow in the School of Science at RMIT University in Melbourne Australia. Dr. Spina is spending two weeks in the CIIR to collaborate with Distinguished… more

The CIIR paper, "A Deep Relevance Matching Model for Ad-hoc Retrieval," was one of the three top "liked" papers of the first day of CIKM 2016, as identified by social media. The paper was co-authored by Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Qingyao Ai, and W… more

CIIR undergrad Tanaya Asnani launched a new iOS application called Swpr. that is intended to connect students with extra meal swipes on their UMass Amherst campus dining commons meal card with students in need of a meal.

A number of the CIIR's alumni (former students, visitors, and post-docs) and current students gathered for a mini-reunion while they were attending SIGIR 2016 in Pisa, Italy in July.

CIIR co-directors Bruce Croft, dean of the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS), and James Allan, chair of the CICS faculty, were recently honored with six of their papers chosen for ACM SIGIR Test of Time Awards.

Distinguished Professor Bruce Croft was an organizer of the ACM SIGIR 2016 Workshop on Neural Information Retrieval (Neu-IR) that took place in Pisa, Italy. It was the first forum for academic and industrial researchers, working at the… more

Japan's Hokkaido University (HU) and the UMass Amherst College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) have embarked on a new initiative to foster collaborative research and education activities in the areas of big data and cybersecurity.

On May 6, a number of the CIIR's recent graduate alumni attended the UMass Amherst campus graduation ceremony and the CICS graduation celebration luncheon. Recent CIIR Ph.D. graduates gathered for a photo with their advisors. Shown left to right… more

CIIR doctoral student, Kriste Krstovski is a member of Aegis, a four student team that was named as one of three runner-up teams in this year's Harvard President's Challenge. Harvard President Drew Faust announced the winners and runners-up… more

CIIR doctoral student, Shiri Dori-Hacohen, came in first place at the final competition of the UMass… more

CIIR doctoral student, Shiri Dori-Hacohen, came in first place at the final competition of the UMass… more

The textbook Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice by Croft, Metzler and Strohman now has over 5,000 downloads. The book is available for free download at http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/… more

Doctoral students John Foley and Emma Strubell are the 2016 recipients of the College's Accomplishments in Search & Mining Awards, sponsored by Yahoo!.

Emma has been doing ground-breaking work in efficient machine learning for natural… more

A team, advised by professor Andrew McCallum's Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory, produced the winning algorithm to take the top prize in an international competition sponsored by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and U.S… more

The ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval was held on September 27 - 30, 2015 in Northampton, MA. James Allan and Bruce Croft were the ICTIR 2015 General Chairs.

The paper "Bayesian Inference for Information Retrieval Evaluation," authored by Ben Carterette (CIIR Ph.D. '08) received the Best Paper Award at the ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (… more

The paper that appeared in SIGIR 2003, "Automatic Image Annotation and Retrieval using Cross-Media Relevance Models" by Jiwoon Jeon, Victor Lavrenko, and R. Manmatha, received an honorable mention for the test of time award at SIGIR 2015,… more

Manish Gupta and Michael Bendersky (CIIR Ph.D. '12) co-authored Information Retrieval with Verbose Queries (Volume 9, Issue 3-4), part of the Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval book… more

The textbook Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice by Croft, Metzler and Strohman is now available for free download at http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/irbook/. It has been edited to… more

On April 8, 2015, the UMass Board of Trustees approved the establishment of the College of Information and Computer Sciences with Bruce Croft being named interim dean. Upon Lori Clarke's retirement in June, James Allan took over as chair of the… more

Doctoral student Venkatesh N. Murthy is a member of team "DeepPap" that competed against four other teams in the final round of the UMass Innovation Challenge held on March 31, 2015. DeepPap aimed… more

Doctoral students Chia-Jung Lee and Arvind Neelakantan are the 2014-2015 UMass Amherst School of Computer Science Accomplishments in Search & Mining Award recipients. Yahoo! has sponsored the Search & Mining Awards since 2009. View the… more

Distinguished Professor Bruce Croft was selected to receive a UMass Amherst Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity Award was presented during the Faculty Convocation on September 12, 2014.

Graduate students David Belanger and Samuel Huston are this year's recipients of the Department's Accomplishments in Search & Mining Awards, sponsored by Yahoo!. View the list of previous recipients.

During the Twelfth International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), graduate students David Wemhoener, Zeki Yalniz, and Research Professor R. Manmatha received the ICDAR 2013 Best Poster Paper Award for "… more

Distinguished Professor Bruce Croft is a recipient of 2014 IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award for "for outstanding contributions to information retrieval and the development of search engines." The award was presented on June 4th… more

We are pleased to announce that Brendan O'Connor joined the CIIR when he arrived at the School of Computer Science in Fall 2014 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. His research interests are in machine learning and natural language processing… more

Microsoft announced that CIIR graduate student Ben Carterette was selected for a Microsoft Live Labs Fellowship. In the 2007-2008 competition, Microsoft chose only four Live Labs fellows and 12 Microsoft Research fellows.

CIIR alumnus Jeremy Pickens (Ph.D. '04) and co-authors Gene Golovchinsky, Chirag Shah (CIIR alum; MS '06), Pernilla Qvarfordt, and Maribeth Back received the Best Paper Award at the 31st… more

A new textbook, Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice, written by W. Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler,… more

Ben Carterette (Ph.D. '08), Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware, won the Best Paper Award at the 2nd International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval for his paper "An Analysis of… more

We are pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Hanna Wallach and her students Meagan Day and Rachel Shorey are now part of the CIIR. Dr. Wallach joined the Computer Science Department in Fall 2010 as part of UMass Amherst's interdisciplinary… more

Marc-Allen Cartright, Henry A. Field and James Allan received the Best Paper Award at the BooksOnline 2011 Workshop (held during CIKM 2011) for their paper "Evidence Finding using a Collection of Books."

CIIR Director Bruce Croft and Mark Sanderson (former CIIR Post-Doc; now a Professor at RMIT University) contributed to the 100th Anniversary Issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE with their paper "… more

CIIR doctoral student Kriste Krstovski received a Harvard University, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, SAO Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. This fellowship, which started in February 2013,… more

UKeiG (U.K. eInformation Group), in association with the International Society for Knowledge Organisation UK and the British Computer Society Information Retrieval Specialist Group announced that Professor W Bruce Croft is the 2013 winner of the… more

Graduate students Jeff Dalton and Luke Vilnis are the 2014 recipients of the School's Accomplishments in Search & Mining Awards, sponsored by Yahoo!. View the list of previous recipients.

At SIGIR 2014, a new Test of Time Award was introduced (recognizing the best papers from 2002 to 2004). The 2002 paper, "Predicting Query Performance," by Steve Cronen-Townsend, Yun Zhou, and W. Bruce Croft received Honourable Mention.

James Allan, UMass Amherst CS Professor and CIIR co-director, and Northeastern University's Jay Aslam are the General co-Chairs of SIGIR '09 conference held in Boston, Massachusetts in July 2009. See sigir2009.org… more

David Smith, a Ph.D. candidate from Johns Hopkins University, joined the CIIR as a Research Assistant Professor in September. Smith brings his experience in the areas of natural language processing and machine translation to the CIIR.

The CIIR/IRLab held a reunion during the SIGIR 2009 conference held in Boston, MA on Wednesday, July 22, 2009. In addition to gathering together old friends, we celebrated Bruce Croft's 30th year at UMass Amherst and James Allan's 15th year. View… more

CIIR alum Fernando Diaz (Ph.D. '04), former CIIR Research Professor and UMass Amherst CS alum Jamie Callan (Ph.D. '93), and co-authors Jaime Arguello (CMU) and Jean-Francois Crespo (Yahoo! Labs Montreal), received the… more

Assistant Professor Hanna Wallach (along with co-authors Ryan Prescott Adams and Zoubin Ghahramani) won the Best Paper Award at AISTATS 2010 (the Thirteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics) for the paper "… more

We are pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Benjamin Marlin has joined the CIIR. Dr. Marlin joined the Computer Science Department tenure-track faculty in Fall 2011. His research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence,… more

Mark D. Smucker (Ph.D. '08), Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo, and co-author Charles L.A. Clarke, received the BEst Paper Award at the 35th Annual International Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (… more

During the CIKM 2013 conference held in San Francisco, CA, the CIIR/IRLab held a reunion on Tuesday, October 29, 2013. View the group photo from the gathering at Blue Line… more

Seven of the CIIR's IRLab students received Ph.D.s during the 2013-2014 academic year. See photo of IRLab Ph.D. graduates who gathered for the CS celebration and campus graduate program… more

The 31st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '08) featured 8 papers and 2 posters from the CIIR. SIGIR 2008 received 496 submissions and accepted… more

Distinguished Professor Bruce Croft gave a keynote address entitled “Unsolved Problems in Search” at the 2008 ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) in October. In addition,… more

Distinguished Professor Bruce Croft gave a keynote speech at ECIR 2009 in Toulouse, France entitled "Query Evolution."

Professor James Allan was named to a 3-year term as Chair of SIGIR (the ACM Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval). ACM SIGIR addresses issues ranging from theory to user demands in the application of computers to the acquisition,… more

In late 2006, Eric Brown (UMass Amherst CS Ph.D. ’96) joined a dozen other researchers at IBM's Watson Research Center and, under the lead of principal investigator David Ferrucci, took on the Jeopardy! Grand Challenge, where the goal is to build… more

Graduate students Henry Feild and Limin Yao are this year's recipients of the Department's Accomplishments in Search & Mining Awards, sponsored by Yahoo!. View the list of previous recipients.

In September 2012, David A. Smith, former CS Research Assistant Professor and current Adjunct Asst. Professor working with the CIIR, joined Northeastern University's College of Computer and… more