International Research School on Information Retrieval Takes Place in Nizhny Novgorod

The 8^th RuSSIR-2014 (Russian Summer School in Information Retrieval), organized by the Higher School of Economics in Nizhny Novgorod and ROMIP, has ended. 

Approximately 150 students, young researchers and teachers from more than 10 countries took part in the school. They were joined by representatives of large companies in the IT sector, including Yandex, Microsoft, Mail.ru, Google, and ABBYY. Leading scholars from the U.S., Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Israel and other countries taught courses on computer language processing and computer search.

Those wishing to participate in the summer school underwent a serious application process that included a defense of applicants’ research work. One sign of the school’s high quality is the plan by Springer, a leading international academic publisher, to publish the best works from the event in the journal Communications in Computer and Information Science.

Nikolay Karpov, Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Business Informatics and Applied Mathematics at the HSE Branch in Nizhny Novgorod, co-chair of the RuSSIR – 2014 organizing committee:

— The Higher School of Economics is well known for its summer schools and RuSSIR is among the events supported by the HSE. The university not only provided space for young researchers and scholars, but also made a significant financial contribution.

This year, RuSSIR was devoted to visualization in information retrieval. This is a promising area in computer science today, and we are glad that we were able to attract young experts. Those who traveled to Nizhny Novgorod to take part in the Summer School came with deep knowledge, so it’s not surprising that their level of training was given high marks by the professors who taught them. Unfortunately, there weren’t as many participants from Nizhny Novgorod as we would have liked, but I think that with future development of the Master’s programme in Computational Linguistics this situation will change and the number of people focused intensely on information retrieval and analysis will grow noticeably.

Professor Alfred Inselberg (Tel Aviv University, Israel), ‘Visualization Guru’:

— In Israel I have a group of Russian students whose level of computer science knowledge and training is higher than others. Participants in RuSSIR-2014 impressed me with their outstanding projects, the depth of their preparation and the questions they asked after my lectures. We had an interesting interactive discussion that did not end in the classroom but continued afterwards during the cultural events that the organizers had set up for us. I can see that these young people, with their drive to grow and learn something new, have a great future ahead!

I will be happy if given the opportunity to come back to Russia, not only to teach but also to study. We are currently beginning conversations with Russian professors about opportunities for joint research, and I have already had one summer school participant agree to travel to the Tel Aviv University to give a series of lectures on computational linguistics. I am certain that this will lay the groundwork for research cooperation between our universities.