Of course, the entire conference (scheduled to take place in Amsterdam, 23-27 July 2007), is of interest to information and search professionals, here are a couple of special events that are worthy of extra attention. We will post more and links to papers that will be presented at SIGIR 2007 during the next two months.

#1: SIGIR Industry Event, Preliminary List of Speakers

++ Omar Alonso from SAP discusses sensemaking in the enterprise, where the Orcatec LCC speaker presents on legal discovery and litigation support.

++ Hugh Williams from Microsoft and Byron Dom from Yahoo will discuss topics in search for end-users.

++ Vertical search is treated by Thomas Mandl, who assesses 54 website search applications, while Craig Scott from Elsevier Scirus explains how web data has been integrated within Scopus.

++ Daniel Tunkelang from Endeca puts the user experience in the spotlight, where Fredhopper’s Ronny Roeller dives into facetted search for e-commerce.

++ Collexis speaks on thesauri construction in the language technology session, and Jakub Zavrel from Textkernel will talk on information extraction and web mining.

#2: Tutorials
Wow! What a line-up of speakers. The following tutorials are 1/2 day events:

+ Introduction to Web Retrieval and Advertising by Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Andrei Broder, and Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo Research.

+ Conducting Interactive IR User Studies by Diane Kelly from the University of North Carolina

+ Introduction to Text Mining by David Lewis of Lewis Consulting

+ The Probabilistic Relevance Model: BM25 and Beyond by Hugo Zaragoza and Stephen Robertson from Yahoo Research and Microsoft Research

+ Cross-Language Information Access by Jianqiang Wang and Daqing He from SUNY Buffalo and the University of Pittsburgh.

+ Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning for IR by Yi Zhang and Rong Jin from UC Santa Cruz and Michigan State University.

+ XML Retrieval: Integrated IR-DB Challenges and Solutions by Sihem Amer-Yahia, Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Mariano Consens, and Mounia Lalmas from Yahoo Research, University of Toronto, and Queen Mary University London.

+ Introduction to Recommender Systems by Joseph Konstan from University of Minnesota.

See Also: From the GroupLens project at the University of Minnesota: Try (free) MovieLens (Film recommendations) and WikiLens (Recommendations. From soda to sailboats). Over 20,000 user ratings.

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