The Glasgow Information Retrieval Group within the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow was founded 32 years ago in 1986 by Professor C. J. ‘Keith’ van Rijsbergen, often considered one of the founders of modern Information Retrieval (IR). From its outset, the Glasgow IR group has focused on improving the effectiveness of IR systems, inventing new logic & probabilistic retrieval models in the 90's and early 2000's, followed by the development of adaptive query expansion techniques, interactive multimedia models, the Divergence From Randomness framework, as well as leading research into quantum, expertise search and search result diversification models in the late 2000's. Since then, the Information Retrieval group embraced emerging machine learning and deep learning technologies for very large corpora and data streams, and have been at the forefront of research, development and application of those technologies for search and recommendation use-cases in a manner that ensures both effectiveness and efficiency.
The Glasgow IR Group has a strong research track record. Indeed, the ACM Digital Library shows that the group is ranked first by number of papers (429) at the SIGIR conference (the top CORE A* conference in the IR field). Meanwhile, a recent study by Microsoft Research of the 40 years of SIGIR showed the University of Glasgow as the 5th most cited university at the conference and the 1st in Europe. The group is also renowned for developing the popular open source IR platform, Terrier.org, which has been downloaded over 60,000 since its first release in 2004 and is cited by over 3500 research papers. Furthermore, the group has a long history of engagement with the public and industry sectors from small SMEs to multinational corporations.
The Informer magazine of BCS's Information Retrieval Specialist Group carried a recent profile on the Glasgow Information Retrieval Group.
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IR Group in a nutshell
- #1 Information Retrieval group in Europe (ACM SIGIR publications)
- Creator of world-famous Terrier.org IR platform
- Leader in next generation Big Data processing technologies
- Leading international data challenges (TREC CARS, TREC Incident Streams)
- Driving innovate intelligent systems for the home, public and commercial sectors
