IR

Welcome to the 32nd ACM SIGIR International Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval. This year's conference reflects the growing diversity of the field, with papers on a wide range of topics that reach well beyond the traditional problems of search on large collections of text.

The conference received 494 submissions of full papers from 34 countries, a similar number to previous years and similarly distributed, with around a third from each of North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Of these, 78 were accepted for full presentation, and a further 26 were offered the opportunity of presentation as posters. There were in addition 256 poster submissions, of which 86 were selected, and 12 of the 36 submissions of candidate demonstrations were successful. SIGIR has had a long-standing tradition of experimental rigor, and in 2009, as in the past, we have required that successful submissions meet equally our expectations of originality and of demonstrated validity. We believe that we have been successful in choosing a program of high standard.

The SIGIR program involves not only papers, posters, and demonstrations, but also six tutorials, eight workshops, a doctoral consortium with 12 students selected from 24 applicants, and two invited talks. One invited talk is given by the 2009 Salton Award winner. This award is a triennial event at SIGIR and we celebrate Susan T. Dumais' contribution to our community. The other invited talk is given by Albert-László Barabási. We are deeply grateful to Albert-László Barabási and Susan T. Dumais for their participation in SIGIR this year and for the opportunity this gives to our attendees.