- Fernando Diaz, D. Kelly. 2015. Session details: Workshops. Abstract: We are pleased to introduce the Workshop Program for the 38th Annual SIGIR Conference. We received 14 workshop proposals, each of which was peer-reviewed by three members of the Workshops PC. After discussion of all submissions in the Workshops PC, as well as with the PC Chairs of the technical program, 7 workshops were accepted (50% acceptance rate). We sought to include topics that covered the breadth of expertise in the SIGIR community, would appeal to a diverse range of SIGIR attendees, and would push the state-of-the-art in IR research. We greatly appreciate all authors who submitted a proposal for consideration and all reviewers for their help in selecting which proposals to include in the program. Finally, we are grateful to Microsoft Research for providing workshop fee waivers for thirty-five students. This year's workshops include new explorations of established topics such as temporal information retrieval, personalization, and question answering. The Workshop on Temporal, Social and Spatially-aware Information Access (#TAIA2015), now in its fourth year at SIGIR, explores the relationship between temporal information access and other data sources. Similarly, the Workshop on Social Personalization & Search (SPS2015) studies the opportunities for improved personalization provided by social data. The Web Question Answering Workshop studies next generation QA systems that go beyond simple factoid questions. In addition to these familiar topics, you will find workshops investigating entirely new subareas of information retrieval. The Workshop on Reproducibility, Inexplicability, and Generalizability of Results (RIGOR) focuses on testing the robustness of existing results in information retrieval. The Workshop on Privacy-Preserving Information Retrieval, which is in its second year, draws together researchers from the privacy and retrieval communities to improve the sensitivity of information retrieval research to user privacy concerns. The Graph Search Workshop studies information retrieval in highly structured information spaces, bringing some of the research topics from industry into a public academic venue. Last but not least, the Workshop on Neuro- Physiological Methods in Information Retrieval Research covers topics on the novel use of physiological data for information retrieval. We believe this year's workshop program reflects the diversity of information retrieval research and are excited for the new directions it will enable and inspire. We hope you find this program interesting and thought-provoking.
