The Information Retrieval Facility (IRF) is an independent, non-profit research institute founded by internationally renowned information retrieval scientists with the mission to facilitate research in large-scale Information Retrieval (IR) and foster knowledge transfer between academia and industry.

The IRF is a member-based organization with over 250 scientific members around the globe and is managed by a Scientific Board composed of international IR experts.

One of the objectives of the IRF is to make the latest academic research developments available to industry and thereby develop solutions to search challenges that are not yet answered by current tools. To do this, the IRF operates on two levels:

• As an Open Science Institution, the IRF maintains a semantic supercomputer infrastructure that facilitates large scale IR experiments and provides access to a large and high-quality corpus of scientific and technical data, enabling scientists to study methods beyond limited laboratory conditions.

• As a Technology Transfer Platform, the IRF brings IR scientists and end-users from the industry together, ensuring that both communities engage in a fruitful dialogue. This interaction between experts from research and industry ensures a high scientific standard and eventually a better relevance of the research work to business