Industry impact award

ECIR 2022 will feature an “industry impact” award. The award aims to encourage IR researchers (especially IR academics**) to think about industrial impact, and hence to strengthen the connection and collaboration with industry.

**This is not to say that the paper should come from academia nor to exclude papers from industry. Though we would expect strong papers of impact to happen when academics collaborate with the industry. **

In addition to receiving an award certificate, the recipients of the award will be presented with a monetary prize of €1000.

The award will be given to authors of one selected paper from the ECIR programme. The award committee will shortlist papers for this award that meet the following criteria:

  • Business value: the paper is clear on the added value (explicitly mentioned) to potential users, the business or the society (e.g. more engaged/happier users, saving time for people, new ways of engaging with information,..). The paper is not restricted to standard scientific metrics and considers business KPIs in the evaluation.  
  • Usefulness and practical utility: another aspect to the business value is the potential practical utility that may benefit existing systems and architectures (e.g. faster way to production, resource saving, cheaper costs, ..).
  • Simplicity/pragmatism: the paper introduces transparent architectures that are easy to understand and to implement whilst potentially not state-of-the-art in performance but close enough.
  • Open source: the paper makes the code available as open source and reuses/extends existing open source libraries.
  • Public data: the paper uses existing open/public datasets and generates new dataset(s) that are released to foster further research.
  • Reproducibility: there are no missing experimental details, of all aspects that matter to the paper, and the results can be reproduced by researchers/practitioners in the IR community and beyond.
  • Efficiency: the paper makes efficient use of computing/human resources and considers or discusses the challenges of running in production.

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