News

Dear Colleagues:

In recent years, excellent papers on information retrieval have been
showing up at a variety of conferences besides SIGIR, the major IR
conference.  This is marvelous sign of increased interest in IR.

Still, we in IR of course want to attract the best IR papers to the
SIGIR meeting, particularly from researchers and practitioners in
other fields.  SIGIR 2001 is making a special effort to attract such
papers by establishing a "mentoring" or "pre-review" option.  Authors
who want to submit a paper to SIGIR 2001, and have not presented a
full-length paper at a past SIGIR meeting, have the option of being
matched up with an experienced SIGIR reviewer. The volunteer "mentor"
will offer comments on a draft paper or description of the work
in advance of the SIGIR deadline (and of course will not be one of the
official reviewers for the final submitted paper, if any).

This mentoring option is inspired by the success of a similar option
at the ACM SIGCHI conference.

If you are interested in this option, please write the Mentoring
Chair, Dave Lewis (ddlewis2@att.net) by October 15. Please send an
abstract or brief description of your area of work (or draft paper if
you
have it), to allow matching with an appropriate mentor.

Further information on SIGIR 2001 (Sept. 17-19, 2001 in New Orleans,
LA, USA) can be found at:
http://www.csc.lsu.edu/~drobins/sighome.html

Regards,
Dave