IR

Welcome to the 25th Anniversary of SIGIR, the Conference of Research and Development in Information Retrieval! Welcome, too, to the city of Tampere. SIGIR was last held in Northern Europe ten years ago, 1992, and the Finnish IR community is happy to host SIGIR for the first time in Finland in its silver anniversary year. During its 25 years, SIGIR has established and held its role as the key information retrieval conference, which presents the state of the art and latest developments to the entire community and beyond. This is also reflected in the record-breaking number of papers, 219, submitted to the conference. The Conference Program Co-Chairs, Micheline Beaulieu, Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Sung Hyon Myaeng therefore had both the pleasure of putting together an excellent program and the challenge of selecting the best among the many excellent contributions.You are cordially invited to participate fully in this conference, to take advantage of all that the technical program has to offer. There are tutorials, keynote addresses, technical paper sessions, poster and demonstration sessions, and workshops that will advance the state of the art of information retrieval and its applications, and discuss their key issues.The Program Committee, along with the Workshops Committee (Pia Borlund and Jaana Kekäläinen, Co-Chairs), the Tutorials Committee (Efthimis Efthimiadis, Chair), the Posters Committee (James Allan, Chair), the Mentoring Committee (Peter Anick, Chair), the Best Paper Awards Committee (Donna Harman, Chair), and the Demonstrations Committee (Eija Airio and Mark Sanderson, Co-Chairs), have organized an excellent series of sessions for anyone interested in advancing information retrieval. The Organizing Committee has done its best to ensure a pleasing combination of well-organized logistics and a pleasant social program for the conference.