Fancy a trip to beautiful Milan? Our 2019 PhD Symposium on Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA) will be held in conjunction with the 12th European Summer School on Information Retrieval (ESSIR 2019, http://www.ir.disco.unimib.it/essir2019/). The Symposium will be held in the afternoon of Wednesday 17 July 2019.

We cordially invite masters and doctoral students to submit a paper on their research topic to the symposium. You’ll learn a lot about Information Retrieval while at the school and get great feedback on your topic, meet lots of other students, as well as hear inspiring talks.

The FDIA Symposium provides an excellent opportunity for students to provide pointers to their work and obtain experience in presenting and communicating their research. ESSIR participants who will submit FDIA papers will be given priority for the ESSIR scholarships.

In the symposium, young researchers will present and discuss their work and ideas. The symposium is complemented by a keynote.

FDIA 2019 is the next chapter in a long list of previous events. Previous symposiums were held in Tianjin, China in 2018 (with ICTIR 2018), Barcelona, Spain in 2017 (with ESSIR 2017); Thessaloniki, Greece in 2015 (with ESSIR 2015); Granada, Spain in 2013 (with ESSIR 2013); Koblenz, Germany in 2011 (with ESSIR 2011), Padova, Italy in 2009 (with ESSIR 2009); London, England in 2008, and Glasgow, Scotland in 2007 (with ESSIR 2007). They have provided an entertaining and exciting forum for early-stage researchers for sharing new research ideas.

Why future directions, because we encourage submissions that focus on early research such as pilot studies, presenting challenges and future opportunities, conceptual and theoretical work, and the contributions from doctoral work.

Why Information Access, because it captures the broader ideas of information retrieval, storage and management to include interaction and usage.

We especially encourage submissions on formative research ideas which present a summary of their doctoral work, initial empirical findings/pilot studies, explore conceptual and/or theoretical models, and/or describe current challenges and opportunities. Submissions focusing on new directions and emerging work in Information Access/Retrieval which create discussion and provoke a reaction are strongly encouraged. Note the work need not be original and can be a summary of past and current work.

Areas of research include, but are not limited to:
- Information Retrieval Theory
- Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, Interactive IR
- Collaborative Information Seeking and Searching
- Learning to Rank
- Neural IR
- Multimedia and Multimodal IR
- Recommender Systems
- Databases + IR
- Semantic Search
- Social Search
- Web IR
- Clustering and Categorization
- Enterprise Search
- Conversational Agents, knowledge graphs
- IR Applications (e.g. Digital Humanities, News IR, IR and Bibliometrics)

All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least one senior researcher on the Programme Committee. Papers should be 5-6 pages in length for presentation and poster (e.g., an outline of the PhD or Master’s project). All submissions should be submitted in LNCS Format. Submissions should be converted to PDF and submitted via Easy Chair:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=fdia2019

We plan to publish the proceedings at CEUR-WS.org.

We strongly encourage students to submit as a solo author. A selection of papers will be invited to give a short oral presentation, while all participants will be asked to present a poster.


IMPORTANT DATES

May 18, 2019: Submission deadline
June 8, 2019: Notification deadline
July 17, 2019: FDIA in Milan (during ESSIR July 15-19)



ORGANIZERS

PC Chairs

Haiming Liu, University of Bedfordshire
Ingo Frommholz, University of Bedfordshire
Yashar Moshfeghi, University of Strathclyde



General Chairs

Gabriella Pasi, University of Milan Bicocca
Maristella Agosti, University of Padua
Nicola Ferro, University of Padua


Programme Committee TBA


Hope to see you in Milan!