Barrou Diallo, EPO: "The IRF Conference and Symposium are unique events. Five years ago many people didn't know about Data Mining in the Industrial Property (IP) world. Similarly, the scientific community did know very little over the increasing collection of patent documents. Thanks to the Information Retrieval Facility (IRF), which annually offered this open forum for both fields, huge progress have been made in applying computer science technologies in order to search patents. A new generation of graduate students did focus its research in an emerging field called Patent Processing. Achievements presented in the course of the IRF Conference and Symposium were of very high standard. As a consequence, the innovation loop initially envisioned and sparked by the IRF, could show during those events a series of fantastic results both on the academic side and the software development area. The IRF PatOlympics competition did prove that not only patent processing software has been developed in response to users requirements, but that they were also mature enough to fairly compete in their speciality: searching and finding prior art documents!"
Tony Russell-Rose, UXLabs: "I’m very grateful to the IRF for inviting me; it was thoroughly productive and enjoyable event and I came away with some very encouraging feedback. In particular, it was interesting to learn more about the IRF’s work in the area of patent retrieval and to explore the extent to which the principles I outlined can be applied to this domain. I have to confess that patent retrieval is not an area to which I’d given much attention hitherto, but that will change: the domain involves some highly sophisticated, discovery-oriented tasks that make it a very rich environment for studying and modelling information-seeking behaviour, extending the scope of search far beyond the traditional boundaries of findability to embrace higher level analysis and sensemaking within a complex, collaborative work context."
Georg F. Schultheiss, PatCom:The 2nd IRF Sientific Conference and the 4th IRF Symposium in 2011 have been very interesting meetings with a lot of ideas under development and a very mixed audience. I hope that the sequence can be continued in the following years! For the presentations in some cases a closer contact to users or a better knowledge on IPR aspects could be helpful for future developments. Research groups from universities in general should try to have better market contact to learn more about urgent needs. The PatOlympics are really interesting although commercial services have been missing. If those want to use their own data sources, this may lead to a modification of the rules, but it should create more reaction and participation. The program committee and the organizers may think about that. With best wishes for the preparation of the 2012 meetings."
Stefanos Vrochidis, Informatics and Telematics Institute: "IRF Symposium is the place where the information retrieval side can really understand the requirements of patent searching. Each time I participate I learn something new! Looking forward to the IRF Symposium 2012."
Jane List, Lighthouse IP Group [about the PatOlympics]: "It was fascinating to have the chance to play with the potential search engines of the future on display here from academia. The contest which the IRF is running provides a good opportunity for the IR academics to meet with and understand the requirements of patent information specialists, and importantly to show case their achievements for the information industry".
Farag Ahmed, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg: "Thank you for hosting such a very good and successful international conference and Symposium. The quality of the speakers and most papers were excellent, the sponsored delicious lunches and coffee breaks provided outstanding food and an atmosphere for conference members to interact and to get to know each other. I would like to emphasize my thanks to the conference and Symposium organizers who were very successful to organize such full schedule events."
Parvaz Mahdabi, University of Lugano: "I enjoyed the entire IRF conference and symposium immensely, it was lots of learning from different fields for me, from patent domain, database, and HCI . I specially appreciate all the hard work you put in to make PatOlympics possible, this event was very interesting for me. The interaction with patent examiners teached me a lot. I've learned few bits about how examiners perform their search and how they devise search strategies. Warm appreciation to the efforts you have invested in bringing patent professionals together with IR people and managing this excellent, unique program. It was my pleasure to participate in the event.
Somayeh Khatiban, City University London: "First of all I would like to appreciate the opportunity and the financial support was given to me to attend IRF conference and symposium. It was actually my first experience of being in an international conference. As a new researcher it was great to meet IR experts in different fields and I got so many good ideas for my own research. The event was very well-organised and I enjoyed every moment of it."