Amsterdam's AI initiative in the spotlight: Search Engines Amsterdam

How does the SEA create a meaningful impact?

In SEA, we help IR enthusiasts, mainly in the Amsterdam ecosystem, to extend their knowledge of the trends and ongoing work, in academia, industry and government, on a diverse set of topics on technology to connect people to information. These talks are especially helpful for junior students to shape their research direction with a better understanding of the current challenges and existing solutions in the field. Importantly, they also help people expand their network and find partners for collaborative projects.
Search, recommendation, and conversational technology attracts interest from many angles. Interesting ideas to help solve longstanding problems in information retrieval emerge around the problem. Bringing together people eager to share ideas with people eager to find out about new ideas is a lot of fun for everyone involved… also for the organizers.

What are the crucial topics within Information Retrieval the SEA would like to further highlight?

In our regular monthly SEA talks, we usually try to have a diversified set of topics and not focus on a particular topic for several consecutive months. This is because the main objective of SEA is to give a fair overview of what is happening within the information retrieval community in the industry and academia. That being said, when planning for each month’s topic, we definitely consider emerging hot topics and try to cover them in the coming months. For example, few months back we had two talks on generative information retrieval, which is a trending topic with three related workshops at this year’s SIGIR, the leading international conference in our area.

What do you think needs to be taken up next in the upcoming research in this field? How do you envision the future of the SEA?

There are various topics that are getting attention in the information retrieval field. To name a few, conversational search and recommendation, that is, algorithms that let users search for and discover information more naturally, using spoken or written language. Then, there is personalized and context-aware search which tries to make the search results more tailored to individual users and more related to the context. As another example, fairness, accountability, transparency, and explainability are increasingly important considerations in the design and deployment of information retrieval systems, especially as these systems are becoming more complex and impactful and these factors can help to ensure that these systems are trustworthy, reliable, and ethical. With the emergence of foundational models and large language models, the information retrieval field, similar to other AI fields, has shown huge interest in applying them for different tasks such as query understanding and expansion, document ranking, question answering, improving conversational search and recommendation, and, providing data for semi-supervision.

We’ll continue to support the local information retrieval community with our monthly talks, occasionally experimenting with new topics, new formats, and new locations. We started the season with an XL event on product search and an event dedicated to information retrieval in Amsterdam.

Interested to attend one of the SEA talks? join the meetup community here.

Follow @irlab_amsterdam on Twitter for the latest updates.

The ELLIS unit Amsterdam thank Prof.dr. Maarten de Rijke and Ali Vardasbi for the contribution.