NEWS

The 42^nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval took place from July 21-25, 2019 at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris, one of the most important scientific centers in Europe.

SIGIR is the premier international forum for the presentation of new research results and the demonstration of new systems and techniques in information retrieval. The conference consisted of five days of papers, demonstrations, tutorials and workshops focused on research and development in the area of information retrieval with over 1,000 participants. W. Bruce Croft of University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Cordelia Schmid of Inria gave the keynote speeches.

In addition, there were many sponsors from various fields including academic, commercial, and technological institutions. Companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Huawei, Facebook, and Criteo, among others sponsored the conference at different levels. At Rakuten, the conference was co-sponsored by Rakuten Institute of Technology (RIT) and Big Data Department (BDD) at the Silver level.   

The Rakuten booth was represented by Dr. Hesam Amoualian, Dr. Parantapa Goswami, and Vice-Senior Manager of BDD, Sebastien Bellefeuille who introduced Rakuten initiatives around the world. They engaged with conference attendees, discussing various ongoing, exciting projects and ideas utilizing state-of-the-art technologies. It was also an opportune time to locate motivated and talented students and candidates interested in learning more about Rakuten and how to work with us in the future.

We want to thank SIGIR and the French Association for Information Retrieval and Applications (ARIA), who helped support the conference.