Search Solutions 2021 will take place on-line Wednesday 24 November, with two tutorial workshops on Tuesday 23 November. The conference is sponsored by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society. As a member of the Conference Committee, we had hoped to run the event on-site in the BCS London HQ but for a range of Covid-precautionary reasons it will be a virtual event.
There are two tutorials on 23 November. A one-day tutorial giving an introduction to natural language processing will be held on site at the BCS HQ. There will also be an afternoon virtual tutorial on search evaluation. The conference structure for 24 November consists of a number of themes with two papers for each theme, so that delegates can get two perspectives on the themes. There will then be a Q&A session after both presentations.
The themes are
- Formulating and treating information needs at work
- Training for IR and data science
- Identifying and addressing misinformation
- Searching the enterprise
- Systematic searching
- Digital asset management
Towards the end of the conference there will be two panel sessions
- What have we learned today?
- What might be the themes for Search Solutions 2022?
All the speakers have substantial experience and given how few conferences there are on search (as somewhat distinct from information retrieval) this will be an excellent opportunity to catch up on trends and challenges and to identify speakers that you may want to talk to further on a 1-on-1 basis.
Search Solutions will also be the occasion for the announcement of the BCS Search Industry Awards and then at the close of the conference there will be the AGM of the IRSG. The closing date for nominations for the Search Industry Awards is today, but I suspect that the awards team will not reject nominations received in the next day or so. The conference programme and the details of the tutorials can be found on the IRSG web site where you can also find the Eventbrite registration link.
Martin White