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.
The CIIR participants at SWIRL IV included CIIR director James Allan, founding director Bruce Croft, and associate director Hamed Zamani along with CIIR alumni Mohammad Aliannejadi (Univ. of Amsterdam; former visiting scholar), Jamie Callan (Carnegie Mellon Univ.; former CIIR assistant director & CICS research faculty; UMass CICS Ph.D. alum), Jeff Dalton (Univ. of Edinburgh; Ph.D. alum), Laura Dietz (Univ. of New Hampshire; former postdoc), Mark Sanderson (RMIT; former postdoc) and Chirag Shah (Univ. of Washington; M.S. alum). In addition to the nine CIIR personnel and alumni in attendance, 16 of the other SWIRL participants have co-authored papers with CIIR researchers. Shown in photo above l. to r.: Jamie Callan, Jeff Dalton, Mark Sanderson, Laura Dietz, Bruce Croft, Mohammad Aliannejadi, James Allan, Chirag Shah, and Hamed Zamani.
The workshop’s purpose is to explore the long-range issues of the Information Retrieval field, to recognize challenges on the horizon, to build consensus on the primary challenges, and to disseminate the results to the research community. A report on the results of SWIRL IV is forthcoming. Previous SWIRL (formerly the Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval in Lorne) workshops were held in 2004 (workshop report), 2012 (workshop report), and 2018 (workshop report), all in Lorne, Australia.
During SWIRL IV, Allan and Zamani gave a presentation on the two-day visioning workshop, “Future of Information Retrieval Research in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence,” that was held in Washington D.C. in July 2024 that they, along with Eunsol Choi and Daniel Lopresti, organized. That visioning workshop report was released by the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium in December 2024.
CIIR researchers have also been involved in the organization of earlier SWIRL workshops and two pre-SWIRL workshops that were precursors for the first SWIRL in 2004. There was a “Workshop on Language Modeling and Information Retrieval” held at Carnegie Mellon University in May 2001 organized by Callan, Croft, and CMU’s John Lafferty, and a second workshop was held at UMass Amherst in September 2002, organized by Allan and Croft. The 2002 workshop report, “Challenges in Information Retrieval and Language Modeling,” was in the ACM SIGIR Forum in Spring 2003. Allan and Croft were also organizers of the SWIRL 2012 workshop, along with Alistair Moffat, Mark Sanderson, and Justin Zobel. CIIR alum Fernando Diaz was one of the organizers of the SWIRL 2018 workshop.