Fancy a trip to Amsterdam? The 12th edition of our PhD Symposium on Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA 2024), organised by the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group, will be held in conjunction with the 15th European Summer School on Information Retrieval (ESSIR 2024, https://2024.essir.eu/, 1-5 July 2024).

We cordially invite Masters and doctoral (PhD) students as well as early-stage researchers to submit a paper on their research topic to the symposium. You’ll learn a lot about Information Retrieval while at the school and get great feedback on your topic, meet lots of other students, and hear inspiring talks.

The FDIA Symposium provides an excellent opportunity for students to give pointers to their work and obtain experience in presenting and communicating their research.

FDIA 2024 is the next chapter in a long list of previous events. Previous symposiums were held in Vienna, Austria (with ESSIR 2023), Lisbon, Portugal (with ESSIR 2022), Milan, Italy in 2019 (with ESSIR 2019), Tianjin, China in 2018 (with ICTIR 2018), Barcelona, Spain in 2017 (with ESSIR 2017); Thessaloniki, Greece in 2015 (with ESSIR 2015); Granada, Spain in 2013 (with ESSIR 2013); Koblenz, Germany in 2011 (with ESSIR 2011), Padova, Italy in 2009 (with ESSIR 2009); London, England in 2008, and Glasgow, Scotland in 2007 (with ESSIR 2007). They have provided an entertaining and exciting forum for early-stage researchers for sharing new research ideas.

Why future directions, because we encourage submissions that focus on early research such as pilot studies, presenting challenges and future opportunities, conceptual and theoretical work, and the contributions from doctoral work.

Why information access, because it captures the broader ideas of information retrieval, storage, and management to include interaction and usage.

We especially encourage submissions on formative research ideas which present a summary of their doctoral work, initial empirical findings/pilot studies, explore conceptual and/or theoretical models, and/or describe current challenges and opportunities. Submissions focusing on new directions and emerging work in Information Access/Retrieval which create discussion and provoke a reaction are strongly encouraged.

Areas of research include, but are not limited to: - Information Retrieval Theory - Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, User Modelling, Interactive IR - Collaborative Information Seeking and Searching - IR for Good - IR Evaluation - Learning to Rank - Retrieval-augmented Generation - Neural and Generative IR - Multimedia and Multimodal IR - Recommender Systems - Web IR - Clustering and Categorization - Enterprise Search - Conversational Agents, knowledge graphs - IR Applications (e.g. Digital Humanities, News IR, Legal IR, IR and Bibliometrics, Academic Search and Recommendation, etc.) - NeuraSearch (use of fMRI, EEG, fNTIR, Eye Tracking, etc. in IR)

Papers should be 4-8 pages in length excluding references for presentation and poster (e.g., an outline of the PhD or Master’s project, a discussion of topics and ideas). Submissions should be converted to PDF and submitted via Easy Chair: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=fdia2024. We plan to publish the proceedings at CEUR-WS.org. Please use the one-column CEUR style (CEURART.zip).

We strongly encourage students to submit as a solo author, but papers with several authors are welcome as well. A selection of papers will be invited to give a short oral and/or poster presentation.

IMPORTANT DATES

June 6, 2024: Submission deadline July 20, 2024: Notification deadline July 3, 2024: FDIA in Amsterdam (during ESSIR July 1-5, 2024)

CONTACT

Please email fdia2024@easychair.org.

ORGANISERS

PC Chairs

Haiming Liu, University of Southampton, UK Ingo Frommholz, University of Wolverhampton, UK Yashar Moshfeghi, University of Strathclyde, UK