PROMISE Retreat
The PROMISE network of excellence organized a two-days brainstorming workshop on 30th and 31st May 2012 in Padua, Italy, to discuss and envisage future directions and perspectives for the evaluation of information access and retrieval systems in multiple languages and multiple media.
25 researchers from 10 different European countries attended the event, covering many different research areas – information retrieval, information extraction, natural language processing, human-computer interaction, semantic technologies, information visualization and visual analytics, system architectures, and so on. The event has been organized as a "retreat" allowing researchers to work back to back and propose hot topics where to focus research in the field in the coming years. Six promising research lines have been envisaged: search applications; contextual evaluation; challenges in test collection design and exploitation; component-based evaluation; ongoing evaluation; and signal-aware evaluation. The ultimate goal of the PROMISE retreat is to stimulate and involve the research community along these research lines and to provide funding agencies with effective and scientifically sound ideas for coordinating and supporting information access research.
The outcomes of the PROMISE retreat have been summarized in a report that has been printed (ISBN 978-88-6321-039-2) and distributed to about 200 participant at CLEF 2012 in Rome, September 2012. The PROMISE retreat report has been also advertised on the main mailing lists in the field and, from September 2012 to date, its online version has been downloaded more than 500 times.
A short communication about the PROMISE retreat has been published in the October 2012 issue of the ERCIM News.
Finally, a condensed version of the PROMISE retreat report has been submitted for the December 2012 issue of SIGIR Forum.