Welcome to the course Foundations of Information Retrieval, a new 5 credit course that is based on the first part of last year’s 10 credit course Information Retrieval. We will introduce some exciting new things in the course: This year’s practical assignments are motivated by use cases of the Text Retrieval Conference’ Genomics track. We will use Elasticsearch, one of today’s most used, and most popular open source scalable search systems. The practical assignments use Jupyter notebooks. We hope to see you at the first lecture on Wednesday 5 September at 10:45h.