The European Summer School on Information Retrieval (ESSIR) is held regularly, providing high-quality teaching of Information Retrieval (IR) and advanced IR topics to an audience of researchers and research students. The school emphasizes the importance of IR—and its latest developments, in bringing accurate information to the right people in a timely, fair, and transparent manner, which is paramount in decision-making in this digital era. The 15th ELLIS ESSIR was held from 1-5 July 2024 and hosted by the IRLab of the University of Amsterdam.
“The ELLIS ESSIR brought together 111 students from over 40 institutions and 22 countries to explore the latest advancements in IR, with a special focus on Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural-based approaches. Renowned experts from academia delivered lectures that covered the many facets of LLMs and IR, along with user-oriented topics such as fairness and explainability. The school not only offered intellectually stimulating content but also provided students with hands-on experience through a week-long hackathon. We are proud to have hosted one of the most inclusive and diverse schools, offering hybrid participation, travel support, and publicly accessible recordings of the talks for those unable to attend. Hosting this event in Amsterdam was an extremely rewarding experience for all involved”, says ELLIS Member and lead of the organising committee of the ELLIS ESSIR 2024, Mohammad Aliannejadi.
The ELLIS flagship school is the largest ESSIR organized so far and the first ESSIR to include a hackathon as part of the program. The school received support and endorsement from the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS), as well as funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 951847, the European Network of AI Excellence Centres (ELISE) Project, Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR), and the Information Retrieval Special Group (IRSG) of the BCS- The Chartered Institute for IT. This extensive support made it possible for the school to provide travel grants and registration fee waivers for selected participants, which promoted inclusivity.
The talk recordings and slides are accessible publicly online, making this year’s ESSIR accessible to a wider group of audience, beyond the school’s participants.
The ELLIS ESSIR familiarized participants with modern research challenges and methods on IR and related disciplines. 18 speakers from diverse backgrounds and seniority levels contributed to the insightful talks, including Suzan Verberne from the University of Leiden (‘Large Language Models (‘LLMs for IR’), Maria Maistro from the University of Copenhagen (‘IR Evaluation and User Modelling’), Guido Zuccon from the University of Queensland, Harrie Oosterhuis from the Radboud University (‘Learning to Rank), and Avishek Anand from the TU Delft (‘Explainable IR’), Sean MacAvaney from the University of Glasgow (‘Retrieval and Re-Ranking’).
Furthermore, among the speakers were the ELLIS Fellow Maarten de Rijke, (‘User Models and Interactive IR’), ELLIS Members such as Evangelos Kanoulas, (’42 Things to know about IR’), Pascal Mettes (‘Introduction to Deep Learning’), Mohammad Aliannejadi (‘LLMs and IR Evaluation’), and Christof Monz (‘Transformer-Based Language Models’), and ELLIS PhD candidates, such as Phillip Lippe (‘Training LLMs at Scale’) and Maria Heuss (‘Fairness in AI’).
The school gathered a community of researchers, students, and industry professionals working on IR, and strengthened connections among them through different social networking opportunities. The 12th edition of the PhD Symposium on Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA 2024) was also held in conjunction with the 15th ESSI in which students as well as early-stage researchers presented their research topic and received valuable feedback on the topic. “Attending the ESSIR was a transformative experience for me. The program provided high-quality instruction on both foundational and advanced IR topics. The up-to-date materials provided a deep dive into current IR trends, such as the exploration of the potentials of LLM applications and their optimization in IR, sparking new ideas that I am eager to integrate into my own research. Networking with a diverse group of global researchers, industry professionals, and PhD candidates enriched the learning experience and initiated potential collaborations. The Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA) conference was particularly inspiring, showcasing innovative research ideas and emerging trends in IR. I am deeply grateful to the organizers, lecturers, and participants for creating a stimulating and supportive environment”, conveys Panggih Kusuma Ningrum, PhD Fellow in Natural Language, Université Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, and participant of the ELLIS ESSIR 2024.
The recorded talks and materials are accessible online on the ELLIS ESSIR Website: https://2024.essir.eu/talks.