CIIR doctoral student Alireza Salemi and Associate Professor Hamed Zamani received the Best Short Paper Award at the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024) for their paper, "Evaluating Retrieval Quality in Retrieval-Augmented Generations."
This is the third year in a row that CIIR Associate Director Zamani and his students have received a SIGIR best paper award.
In addition to Salemi's and Zamani's SIGIR 2024 award, two CIIR Ph.D. alums and three CIIR former postdoctoral researchers/scientists also received awards at the 2024 SIGIR conference held in Washington, D.C. in July 2024.
CIIR Ph.D. alum Qingyao Ai and co-authors and former CIIR Postdoc/Research Scientist Laura Dietz shared the 2024 SIGIR Best Paper Award. Ai et al received the award for "Scaling Laws for Dense Retrieval," and Dietz was selected for her paper, "A Workbench for Autograding Retrieve/Generate Systems."
Qingyao Ai also received an ACM SIGIR Early Career Researcher Award for a "wide variety of contributions to IR in a wide variety of areas, from neural models to unbiased learning to rank." In 2023, Prof. Zamani received a SIGIR Early Career Researcher Award.
CIIR Ph.D. alum Fernando Diaz and CIIR Postdoc alum Mark Sanderson were each inducted in the 2024 SIGIR Academy which, according to SIGIR, "honors and recognizes individuals who have made significant, cumulative contributions to the development of the field of information retrieval."
CIIR Postdoc alum Yongfeng Zhang and co-authors received the SIGIR 2024 Test-of-Time Award for their 2014 paper, "Explicit Factor Models for Explainable Recommendation based on Phrase-level Sentiment Analysis."
SIGIR is the premier international forum for the presentation of new research results and for the demonstration of new systems and techniques in information retrieval.