The purpose of this seminar is to expose the students to the recent advances in the research of information retrieval through presentations of papers from the top conferences in information retrieval and its related areas. In most of the cases, the presentations will be given by graduate students in our department who work on information retrieval or related areas. Both the papers to present and the speakers will be chosen by the instructor.
In order to get the credit for the course, the students are expected to participate in at least 85% of the talks, which means that you should not miss more than 2 talks. Presenting a paper, however, is not required. If you are interested in presenting a paper, please contact the instructor.
The seminar will meet every Thursday afternoon, 3-4pm in Siebel Center, room 2124. In each meeting, the presentation is expected to last no more than 40 minutes if without interruption, so as to leave some time for discussion. The room is reserved until 5pm, so if necessary, the disucssion can continue afterward. Participants are strongly encouraged to ask questions during/after the presentation. Skills for technical communications are extremely important for researchers. One goal of this seminar is to provide a relatively informal environment for students to freely express opinions and criticize the state-of-the-art research work. Such criticisms are necessary in order to extend the current work and achieve new breakthroughs. As a participant, you will benefit more from the seminar if you read the paper(s) to be presented in advance.