CIKM and INRA’19 in Turin

Author: Benjamin Kille

Turin hosted the 27th edition of Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) on 22-26 October 2018. The first day featured nine workshops. We co-organised the sixth edition of the International Workshop for News Recommendation and Analytics (INRA). Between twenty and thirty attendees listened to three keynote talks. Frank Hopfgartner, senior lecturer at Sheffield University, presented a comprehensive review of information retrieval as well as recommender systems evaluation initiatives. Anja Benner-Tischler, legal scholar at Kassel University, outlined the recently introduced EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). Leif Ramming, the lead of plista‘s machine learning team, discussed issues related to scaling up recommender systems on an industrial level. In addition, attendees followed six paper presentations. The seventh paper could not be presented in person due to visa issues.

The second day commenced with the keynote speech by Maarten de Riijke. He highlighted the interactive aspects of environments, in which todays information access systems operate. Subsequently, the conference split into three rounds with five parallel sessions each. The day concluded with the first of three short, demo, and industry sessions. The third day kicked off with Edward Grefenstette‘s keynote about how modelling rewards affects agents’ learning of language. The remainder of the day followed the same structure as before with three rounds of five parallel sessions followed by the second short, demo, and industry session. Yoelle Maarek started the fourth day with her keynote about Amazon’s Alexa. Subsequently, attendees split up to listen to the final rounds of research talks. Besides the final short, demo, and industry session, the programme included a townhall discussion. The final day offered a selection of tutorials.

In 2019, CIKM will take place in Beijing, China on 3-7 November.