NSF Award
2409649
This project provides support for about 25 U.S.-based graduate students to participate in the 47th ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024), which will be held in Washington, D.C., July 14-18, 2024. SIGIR is the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. The SIGIR conference has been promoting research, development, and education in search and other information access technologies. It is the major international forum for the presentation, demonstration, and dissemination of new research, new systems, and new techniques in the broad field of information retrieval. The conference is a highly selective meeting that includes oral and poster presentations of refereed papers as well as panel discussions and invited talks by leading experts from industry and academia. The conference covers all aspects of information retrieval research, including theories and foundations, algorithms and applications, evaluation and analysis, and humans and societal impacts. The conference this year will continue these main themes in information retrieval studies. In addition, this year’s conference will feature special themes including (1) new perspectives on information retrieval inspired by recent advances in generative AI techniques such as large language models; (2) information retrieval research enterprise and infrastructure sponsored by various U.S. government agencies located around Washington, D.C.<br/><br/>A strong representation of U.S. students and researchers at the conference is essential in maintaining U.S. competitiveness in this important area today and into the future. The selection of Student Travel Grant awardees will put emphasis on the diversity of the students. As in various STEM fields, increasing the diversity of participants at SIGIR is a primary goal. By providing these travel awards, the conference hopes to attract the attendance of a larger number of female students as well as students from other underrepresented groups. This project aims to help U.S.-based students overcome financial barriers that may prevent them from attending the conference. The award will be advertised through various channels including the SIGIR 2024 website (https://sigir-2024.github.io/) and social media platforms.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
