IR4QA: Information Retrieval for Question Answering
A SIGIR 2004 Workshop

OK so this isn't really somewhere new or interesting. I mean a workshop in the city where I live isn't exactly getting me out and about around the world. I'm listing it here though because not only is it a workshop at a prestigious conference in which two of the papers have my name on them but also I'm actually involved in the organization as well.

Previously in My Life...

Well all the organization is complete the papers have been reviewed, selected and sent to the printers and so now I can relax for a week or so before the actual workshop. Hopefully the workshop itself will go as smoothly as the organization side of things seems to have done!

Thursday 29^th July

The main problem facing me in the morning was actually getting to the University in time for the workshop. Unfortunately I live quite a way from the centre of Sheffield and the bus drivers were all out on strike, so I had to remember to order a cab the night before to make sure I would arrive in time.

Once I'd arrived my troubles were not over as the first thing I did was to pick up a printed copy of the workshop proceedings. Now I'd spent quite a bit of time getting all the papers together and producing a single (very large) PDF file with blank pages for double sided printing and everything. All this preparation was wasted as the University printing services had messed up in a big way. The first two papers were OK but then we seemed to have copies of the papers from a formal methods workshop - certainly nothing I could immediately understand. Fortunately a new batch of proceedings were hastily printed ready for the first coffee break.

Anyway the actual workshop went really well. We had accepted a total of ten papers, all of which were interesting and well presented (I'll assume mine was well presented but it's always difficult to know exactly how well you have done).

In fact the day went so well that during the discussion session at the close of the workshop we had an almost unanimous decision that another workshop should be organized in 18 months to two years time to further push research in this important area.