For over a decade, leaders in the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) have been instrumental in shaping the direction and identity of the International Conference on Innovative Concepts and Theories in Information Retrieval (ICTIR), leading to the recent renaming and rebranding of the conference.
Formerly known as the ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval, the conference has been transformed through the efforts of CIIR Associate Director and Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) Associate Professor Hamed Zamani, who led a successful campaign to the ICTIR Steering Committee and ACM executives, resulting in the conference’s new name and refined focus.
The rebranded ICTIR provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of research related to the foundational aspects of information retrieval (IR), including new or improved models of relevance, ranking, representation, information needs, and evaluation. The conference also emphasizes interdisciplinary research that integrates information retrieval with other theoretically-motivated domains.
“While IR research traditionally relies heavily on rigorous experimentation, ICTIR does not see this as a must. It encourages researchers to think beyond available resources. This is particularly important for academic research since access to large-scale, real-world resources is not always available,” said Zamani. “The focus of ICTIR is more on conceptual and theoretical innovation. Large-scale empirical validation can happen later if and when the necessary resources become available.” Zamani notes that it’s still fine to have empirical evaluation, of course!
Zamani will serve as the general chair of ICTIR 2025 – the 11th ACM SIGIR-sponsored conference and the 15th ICTIR conference overall – co-located with SIGIR 2025 in Padua, Italy, in July. Notably, this year’s conference will feature two submission tracks: regular submissions and papers invited via SIGIR’s "Revise-and-Resubmit" mechanism, accelerating the timeline for publishing emerging research. Papers addressing the theme "LLMs + IR, what could possibly go wrong?" are also encouraged, reflecting the field’s ongoing engagement with large language models.
CIIR’s leadership has long shaped the trajectory of ICTIR. In 2014, CIIR founder and then-director Bruce Croft and co-director James Allan led the successful effort to secure ACM SIGIR sponsorship for the conference—an achievement that elevated ICTIR’s visibility and credibility in the global research community.
“When ICTIR gained sponsorship by ACM SIGIR, it gained the prominence of being explicitly supported by the flagship international organization, elevating ICTIR to a whole new level,” said Allan, who now serves as the CIIR Director.
Allan and Croft went on to co-chair the first ACM SIGIR-sponsored (and fifth overall) ICTIR conference in 2015, held in Northampton, Massachusetts. The 2025 edition continues a legacy of innovation and impact, reaffirming CIIR’s leadership in shaping the future of information retrieval research.
Article above reprinted from CICS news
History of ICTIR: ICTIR grew from a series of SIGIR workshops on mathematical and formal methods for IR held from 2000 to 2005, led by Sándor Dominich and Keith van Rijsbergen: SIGIR 2000, Athens, Greece; SIGIR 2001, New Orleans, LA, U.S.A.; SIGIR 2002, Tampere, Finland; SIGIR 2003, Toronto, Canada; SIGIR 2004, Sheffield, U.K.; and SIGIR 2005, Salvador, Brazil. ICTIR became a full conference supported by BCS-IRSG in 2007: ICTIR 2007 held in Budapest, Hungary; ICTIR 2009 in Cambridge, U.K.; ICTIR 2011 in Bertinoro, Italy; and ICTIR 2013 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The 2015 conference in Northampton, MA, U.S.A. marked the first year with ACM SIGIR sponsorship. Since 2015, ICTIR has been held annually.
