Last week I attended the 6th European Summer School in Information Retrieval hosted by the Information Retrieval group of the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow.
The school hit a record in the number of participants: over 200! I had the fantastic opportunity of meeting IR researchers and people working in the IR industry from almost all parts of the world.
The week was filled with lectures held by prominent IR researchers such as Prof. Keith van Rijsbergen (uni. Glasgow), Dr. Mark Sanderson (uni. Sheffield), Prof. Stephen Robertson (Microsoft Research/City University
U.K) among many others. The school gave a broad introduction to the area of Information Retrieval, including lectures on IR Systems/Architecture, Evaluation in IR, Multimedia Retrieval, Web Usage and Data Mining,
Distributed and Peer-to-Peer IR to mention just a few.
I was lucky enough to receive a partial funding grant from CEPIS (The Council of European Professional Informatics Societies)!
To learn more about the Summer School or the speakers, see: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/essir2007/