Call for Participation: Dutch-Belgian IR workshop

The 9th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR) will take place at the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands, on February 2-3, 2009. The workshop is organised under the auspices of the Working Community on Information Sciences (WGI) and the School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS). The workshop is sponsored by NWO, CTIT and the University of Twente.

Keynote Speaker: prof. Gerhard Weikum (MPII, Saarbruecken, Germany) Gerhard Weikum is Research Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) in Saarbruecken, Germany, where he is leading the department on databases and information systems. Prof. Weikum is ACM fellow and a renowned expert in the field of Databases. He received the VLDB 10-Year Achievement Award in 2002. Since then, he focused on several information retrieval problems such as peer-to-peer search, search efficiency, and database and search integration, resulting in for instance 6 full papers at the last SIGIR conferences.

Due to the cooperation between SIKS, SIKS-members can participate without paying entrance fee. Especially PhD-students working on the SIKS-focus “Web based Information Systems” and “Data management, Storage and Retrieval” are strongly encouraged to participate. There is a limited number of registrations for SIKS members. Registrations will be honored in a first come-first serve manner.

Participants of DIR are invited to the Annual Meeting of the Werkgemeenschap Informatieschap which is directly following DIR on Tuesday.