SIGIR is the Association for Computing Machinery

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval

Information retrieval

Information retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...

. The scope of the group's specialty is the theory and application of computers to the acquisition, organization, storage, retrieval and distribution of information; emphasis is placed on working with non-numeric information, ranging from natural language to highly structured data bases.

Conferences

The annual international SIGIR conference, which began in 1978, is considered the most important in the field of information retrieval. SIGIR also sponsors the annual Joint Conference on Digital Libraries JCDL in association with SIGWEB

SIGWEB

The Bay Area SIGWEB was a special interest group for the World Wide Web that was founded in August 1993 by the staff of the University of California, San Francisco Center for Knowledge Management , at the direction of CKM Director Dr...

, the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management CIKM, and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining WSDM in association with SIGKDD

SIGKDD

SIGKDD is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. It became an official ACM SIG in 1998.- Conferences :...

, SIGMOD

SIGMOD

SIGMOD is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data, which specializes in large-scale data management problems and databases....

, and SIGWEB

SIGWEB

The Bay Area SIGWEB was a special interest group for the World Wide Web that was founded in August 1993 by the staff of the University of California, San Francisco Center for Knowledge Management , at the direction of CKM Director Dr...

.

SIGIR Conference Locations

Number	Year	Location
22	1999	Berkeley, California Berkeley, California Berkeley is a city on the east shore of the San Francisco Bay in Northern California, United States. Its neighbors to the south are the cities of Oakland and Emeryville. To the north is the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington...
23	2000	Athens Athens Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...
24	2001	New Orleans
25	2002	Tampere Tampere Tampere is a city in southern Finland. It is the most populous inland city in any of the Nordic countries. The city has a population of , growing to approximately 300,000 people in the conurbation and over 340,000 in the metropolitan area. Tampere is the third most-populous municipality in...
26	2003	Toronto Toronto Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
27	2004	Sheffield Sheffield Sheffield is a city and metropolitan borough of South Yorkshire, England. Its name derives from the River Sheaf, which runs through the city. Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, and with some of its southern suburbs annexed from Derbyshire, the city has grown from its largely...
28	2005	Salvador, Bahia Salvador, Bahia Salvador is the largest city on the northeast coast of Brazil and the capital of the Northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia. Salvador is also known as Brazil's capital of happiness due to its easygoing population and countless popular outdoor parties, including its street carnival. The first...
29	2006	Seattle
30	2007	Amsterdam Amsterdam Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...
31	2008	Singapore Singapore Singapore , officially the Republic of Singapore, is a Southeast Asian city-state off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, north of the equator. An island country made up of 63 islands, it is separated from Malaysia by the Straits of Johor to its north and from Indonesia's Riau Islands by the...
32	2009	Boston Boston Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
33	2010	Geneva Geneva Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
34	2011	Beijing Beijing Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...
35	2012	Portland, Oregon Portland, Oregon Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
36	2013	Dublin
37	2014	Gold Coast, Australia

Awards

The group gives out several awards to contributions to the field of information retrieval. The most important award is the Gerard Salton Award

Gerard Salton Award

The Gerard Salton Award is presented by the Association for Computing Machinery SIGIR every three years to an individual who has made "significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval"...

 (named after the computer scientist Gerard Salton

Gerard Salton

Gerard Salton , also known as Gerry Salton, was a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. Salton was perhaps the leading computer scientist working in the field of information retrieval during his time...

), which is awarded every three years to an individual who has made "significant, sustained and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval".