The RIAO 2007 Conference – A Personal View Adrian

This review summarizes the main topics covered by the presentations given at the RIAO 2007 Conference. The theme of this year’s conference, “Large-scale Semantic Access to Content (Text, Image, Video and Sound)”, encompasses two current, and recurring, challenges in Information Retrieval: inclusion of semantics in retrieval and adaptation to different types of media. The use of the term “large-scale” underlines the need for scalable methods in real-world applications. RIAO 2007, hosting both innovative applications and research papers, presented a panorama of current trends in semantics based information retrieval. 1 Conference History and Structure RIAO 2007 was held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh PA, U.S.A, from May 30 to June 1, 2007. This was the eighth session of the tri-annual conference, held alternately in Europe and in North America. Previous meetings took place in: 1985 (Grenoble); 1988 (M.I.T. Cambridge, MA. USA), 1991 (Barcelona, Spain), 1994 (Rockefeller University, New York, N.Y. U.S.A.), 1997 (McGill University, Montreal, Canada) (2000, Collège de France, Paris) and 2004 (University of Avignon, Vaucluse, France). This year’s theme: “Large-Scale Semantic Access to Content (Text, Image, Video and Sound)” was covered by almost 90 presentations, in three different tracks: • full-papers – 11 sessions comprising a total of 33 papers (acceptance rate 25%) • posters – 2 sessions including 29 presentations (acceptance rate 33%) • applications – 20 demonstrations of research prototypes and production systems 1 The conference was organized by the CID (Centre de Hautes Etudes Internationales d’Informatique Documentaire – the International Center for Advanced Studies in Documentary Information) and its American affiliate CASIS (Center for Advanced Studies on Information Systems), in collaboration with IRIT (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse). RIAO is a French acronym for Recherche d’Information Assistée par Ordinateur (Computer-aided Information Retrieval). The Organizing Committee was coordinated by Ms. Agnès Bériot, the C.I.D general secretary. The Program Committee was co-chaired by David Evans (CEO, Clarvoyance Corporation for the Americas), Sadaoki Furui (Tokyo Institute of Technology for Asia and Oceania) and Chantal Soulé-Dupuy (IRIT – Université Toulouse I for Europe and Africa) and included 80 members. The Applications Committee numbered 29 members and was co-chaired by Frédéric Le Roux (Agence Régionale de Développement) et Josiane Mothe (IRIT, Université de Toulouse, IUFM, France). ACM SIGIR Forum 46 Vol. 41 No. 2 December 2007 The presenters, as well as the organizers and the attendees, reflected the strong international character of the conference: 10 European and 6 Asian countries were represented, along with the USA, Canada, Australia and Tunisia. The majority of presenters came from France, the USA, Japan and the UK.