The CIIR Talk Series is a new initiative for researchers and practitioners working on information retrieval and related disciplines to present their work. Presentations will be held biweekly on Fridays from 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. (with some exceptions) for the Fall 2020 semester. The presentations will be online (for now) and open to the public.
Faculty Host: Hamed Zamani
To receive notifications for talks and links to the presentations, subscribe to our mailing list by sending an email to ciir-talks-request@cs.umass.edu with "subscribe" as the email subject (without the quotation marks).
You can view prior CIIR Talk Series presentations on our YouTube Channel.
Spring 2021 Schedule of Speakers
Friday - January 15, 2021 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EST (North American Eastern Standard Time)
Talk Title: What Does Conversational Information Access Exactly Mean and How to Evaluate It?
Speaker: Krisztian Balog, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Stavanger, Norway
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Alex Taubman for the passcode.
Friday - January 29, 2021: No Talk Today
Friday - February 12, 2021 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EST (North American Eastern Standard Time)
Talk Title: Online Hyperparameter Optimization by Real-time Recurrent Learning
Speaker: Kyunghyun Cho, Associate Professor at New York University
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Alex Taubman for the passcode.
Friday - February 26, 2021 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EST (North American Eastern Standard Time)
Talk Title: Retrieve-and-generate: How to Automatically Create Relevant Articles
Speaker: Laura Dietz, Assistant Professor at University of New Hampshire
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Alex Taubman for the passcode.
Friday - March 12, 2021 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EST (North American Eastern Standard Time)
Talk Title: Neural Information Retrieval: In search of meaningful progress
Speaker: Bhaskar Mitra, Principal Applied Scientist at Microsoft
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Alex Taubman for the passcode.
Friday - March 26, 2021 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT (North American Eastern Daylight Saving Time)
Talk Title: Explainable Human-centered AI
Speaker: Yongfeng Zhang, Assistant Professor at Rutgers University
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Alex Taubman for the passcode.
Friday - April 9, 2021 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT (North American Eastern Daylight Saving Time)
Talk Title: On the support of human learning during search and sensemaking activities
Speaker: Claudia Hauff, Associate Professor at TU Delft, The Netherlands
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Alex Taubman for the passcode.
Friday - April 23, 2021 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT (North American Eastern Daylight Saving Time)
Talk Title: Operationalizing legal and societal constraints in information access systems
Speaker: Asia J. Biega, Tenure-Track Faculty at Max-Planck Institute
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Alex Taubman for the passcode.
Friday - May 7, 2021 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT (North American Eastern Daylight Saving Time)
Talk Title: Alexa Shopping Research
Speaker: Vanessa Murdock, Applied Science Manager at Amazon
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Alex Taubman for the passcode.
Fall 2020 Schedule of Speakers
Friday - October 9, 2020 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT (North American Eastern Daylight Saving Time)
Talk Title: Corpus-Level End-to-End Exploration for Interactive Systems
Speaker: Grace Hui Yang, Associate Professor at Georgetown University
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Randy Barrios for the passcode.
Friday - October 23, 2020 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EDT (North American Eastern Daylight Saving Time)
Talk Title: Challenges in Personal Search and Intelligence
Speaker: Donald Metzler, Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Alex Taubman for the passcode.
Friday - November 6, 2020 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EST (North American Eastern Standard Time)
Talk Title: Modelling and Measuring Information-Interactions
Speaker: Leif Azzopardi, Associate Professor at University of Strathclyde, Scotland
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Alex Taubman for the passcode.
Friday - November 20, 2020 - 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM EST (North American Eastern Standard Time)
Talk Title: From sessions to conversations and back again
Speaker: Evangelos Kanoulas, Professor at University of Amsterdam
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Mike Pfeiffer for the passcode.
Friday - December 4, 2020 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EST (North American Eastern Standard Time)
Talk Hosted by the CIIR and the Center for Data Science
Talk Title: The Potential for Personalization in Search
Speaker: Susan Dumais, Technical Fellow and Director of the Microsoft Research Labs in New England, New York City and Montréal
Zoom Link: Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Alex Taubman for the passcode.
Friday - December 18, 2020 - 1:00 - 2:00 PM EST (North American Eastern Standard Time)
Talk Title: Evaluating Stochastic Rankings with Expected Exposure
Speaker: Fernando Diaz, Research Scientist at Google Brain Montréal
Zoom Link Subscribe to mailing list (details above) for Zoom Link/Passcode notifications; or click here for Zoom link and reach out to Alex Taubman for the passcode.