History of ICTIR

The International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR) provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of research related to the foundational aspects of Information Retrieval (IR), including, for example, new or improved models of relevance, ranking, representation, information needs, and evaluation. The need for formal frameworks is universal across the many applications of information retrieval. In addition to the established approaches in IR, the conference encourages the submission of papers that are attempting to define new tasks, develop new search paradigms, or apply methods from related disciplines, such as natural language processing, machine learning, statistics, or quantum mechanics. Large-scale experimental studies are not required for ICTIR papers, although solid evidence (theoretical or empirical) in support of new theories is expected.

ICTIR grew from a series of SIGIR workshops on mathematical and formal methods for IR held during the years 2000 to 2005, led by Sándor Dominich and Keith van Rijsbergen. In 2007, ICTIR became a full conference supported by BCS-IRSG. Since then, ICTIR has been held in 2007 (Budapest, Hungary), 2009 (Cambridge, U.K.), 2011 (Bertinoro, Italy) and 2013 (Copenhagen, Denmark).

In 2014 ICTIR became a fully-sponsored ACM SIGIR conference and also associated with BCS-IRSG. In September 2015, ICTIR will be hosted by the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval which is in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The conference chairs are James Allan and Bruce Croft.

ICTIR 2016 will be held at the University of Delaware in Newark, DE (USA) on September 12 - 15, 2016.

(history source: SIGIR site)