------------------------------------------- Call for Bids to Host ESSIR 2026

Deadline: 8 March 2024

Further details: https://www.essir.eu/ Contact: chair@essir.eu -------------------------------------------

The Steering Committee of the European Summer School on Information Retrieval (ESSIR) invites interested parties to submit bids to host ESSIR in 2026.

## INTRODUCTION ##

The ESSIR initiative is a self-organized body, whose main mission is to promote research, innovation, and development of information access systems by educating junior and senior researchers, students, professionals, developers, and practitioners on the latest developments in the field, both methodological and technological.

The ESSIR event is a week-long event, organized over the summer, where renowned lecturers and students interact together in a number of ways, e.g. lectures, hands-on sessions, flipped classrooms, aimed at the most effective teaching and learning of both basic and advanced topics on information access at large.

By targeting information access at large, ESSIR places itself at the crossroad of several neighbors disciplines, namely + Information Retrieval (IR) + Recommender Systems (RecSys) + Natural Language Processing (NLP) + Machine Learning (ML) + Artificial Intelligence (AI) + Data Science (DS)

ESSIR gives participants a grounding in the core subjects such as architectures; algorithms; formal theoretical models; evaluation theory and practice, as well as a coverage of recent topics and trends in the field, such as fairness, conversational search, and more.

ESSIR is aimed at: advanced undergraduate students; PhD students; post-doctoral researchers; academic and industrial researchers; developers.

Traditionally, ESSIR is co-located with accompanying events (such as the Symposium on Future Directions in Information Access, FDIA) that give the participants an excellent opportunity for focused discussions on recent emerging topics in Information Retrieval.

Further details on ESSIR can be found at: https://www.essir.eu/

## PROPOSAL SUBMISSION AND SELECTION ##

Parties interested in hosting ESSIR 2026 are invited to submit proposals, in PDF format, by email to the ESSIR Steering Committee chair Nicola Ferro at

chair@essir.eu

by

** 8 MARCH 2024 **

Proposals will be evaluated by the ESSIR Steering Committee. Evaluation will take into account: + venue and timing: attractiveness of the location, hosting facilities, transportation options, accommodation, social program options, targeted event week, key dates, avoidance of timing conflicts with other relevant IR events and large-scale local public events. + scientific program: foundational topics, special lectures, accompanying events (podium discussions, poster sessions, etc.), strategy for acquiring and organizational support of high-quality IR lecturers. Proposals should also take into consideration the scheduling of relevant co-located events (symposiums, workshops) like FDIA. + support for student participants: grants, special conditions for participation and/or accommodation, opportunity to collect ECTS credit points, networking events, opportunities for personal dialogue with ESSIR lecturers. + financial viability: initial draft of the financial plan including major fixed and variable costs, budget cut-off points, strategy of sponsoring acquisition. + plans for organisation: local organizer consortium and its expertise in event/hosting management, key roles and initial responsibility assignments. Analysis of major risks (such as appropriate number of participants, commitment of key lecturers, sufficient amount of sponsoring) and reasonable fallback options. + dissemination and publicity: plans for reaching the target audience through mailing lists, direct contacts to research groups, scientific social networks, Web 2.0 channels, Web presence. Opportunities to share ESSIR materials within research community: slides, video lectures, scripts, post-proceedings, etc.

The ESSIR charter and a bid template is available at:

https://www.essir.eu/assets/charter/essir-sc-charter.pdf

## INQUIRIES AND FURTHER INFORMATION ##

For any inquiries or if any additional information is needed, please write to chair@essir.eu

## ESSIR STEERING COMMITTEE ##

- Nicola Ferro, University of Padua, Italy [chair] - Maristella Agosti, University of Padua, Italy - Catherine Berrut, Université Grenoble Alpes, France - Pablo Castells, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain and Amazon, USA - João Magalhães, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal - Iadh Ounis, University of Glasgow, UK - Gabriella Pasi, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy - Florina Piroi, TU Wien, Austria