IAI (Information Access and Interaction) at the University of Stavanger had a fruitful and eventful year in 2021. From receiving prestigious awards to welcoming new members and engaging in research activities, the group made significant contributions to the field of information retrieval. Here are some of the key highlights and achievements from IAI in 2021.
Rewards
Vinay Setty, co-founder of Factiverse, a spinoff company from UiS/IAI, received the SR-bank's innovation award for 2020. The award recognized Vinay Setty's outstanding contribution to developing software identifying fake news and news lacking credibility. This achievement highlights the commitment of IAI researchers to addressing the challenges of information verification and promoting trustworthy information dissemination. The official announcement can be found on the University of Stavanger's homepage.
The paper entitled "Conversational AI from an Information Retrieval Perspective: Remaining Challenges and a Case for User Simulation" authored by Krisztian Balog received the Best Paper Award at the 2nd International Conference on Design of Experimental Search & Information Retrieval Systems (DESIRES '21). This recognition signifies the excellence and relevance of IAI's research in the field of conversational AI and information retrieval. The paper is now available online.
Group activities
IAI actively participated in the TREC 2021 Conversational Assistance Track. By engaging in this track, IAI researchers had the opportunity to evaluate and refine their methodologies, contributing to the advancement of conversational information retrieval systems. The working paper describing IAI participation is now available online.
New members
Ivica Kostric joined IAI as a Ph.D. student, working on conversational AI under the supervision of Krisztian Balog. This position was partially funded by Google.
Visitors
Christin Kreutz, a Ph.D. student from the University of Trier, Germany, visited IAI for a period of three months. During her visit, Christin focused on researching the reviewer coverage problem of conference program committees. This collaboration enabled the exchange of ideas and expertise, fostering an international research network and facilitating knowledge sharing.
Publication venues
IAI researchers achieved significant publication success in 2021:
- 5 papers accepted at International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR’21)
- 1 paper published in ACM Transactions on the Web
- 1 paper accepted at ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys ‘21)
- 1 paper accepted at IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT’21)