History of SIGIR

ACM SIGIR is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. SIGIR focuses on all aspects of information storage, retrieval and dissemination, including research strategies, output schemes and system evaluations. For more information, see:

• The ACM website
• The SIGIR website

About the conference

The SIGIR conference has a history that dates back to 1971. In that year, Jack Minker and Sam Rosenfeld organised the ACM SIGIR Information Storage and Retrieval Symposium. The first official SIGIR conference was held in 1978 in Rochester, New York in the USA chaired by James Iverson. The second conference in Dallas, Texas in the USA was chaired by Robert Korfhage. The third conference moved across the Atlantic to Cambridge, UK, chaired by Keith van Rijsbergen in cooperation with the British Computer Society (BCS). The Cambridge conference started the tradition of alternating between a North American and non-North American location. Today, SIGIR alternates in a three year cycle between a North American location, a European location, and another location. Next year, SIGIR will be held in Singapore.

SIGIR 2007 in Amsterdam is the 30th SIGIR conference in a row. In 30 years of SIGIR, the avid SIGIR attendee would have accumulated about 138,430 frequent flier miles (222,836 km) just going from one conference location to the next.