IRF Symposium 2007 - Testimonials
Testimonials from the IP World
“The IRF Symposium 2007 was a unique opportunity to learn of the many disciplines of Information Retrieval and the techniques available to the patent industry. While the presentations were informative, it was the many conversations among academic leaders and patent professionals that revealed the most potential for collaboration.
If IRFS2007 is any gauge, IRFS2008 should be very educational and enjoyable.”
George Shreck
Product Manager
Landon IP, Inc.
“IRFS2007: An opportunity to meet the other side of information.
In a numerically balanced and pleasantly compact symposium, Information Retrieval and Intellectual Property Information Specialists meet.
Representatives of the Intellectual Property Information world demonstrate the daily practice and drawbacks using currently available tools and would like to have improved or solved. Representatives of the Information Retrieval groups display the capabilities of the different tools they are developing.
IRF provides an environment where the needs and wishes of the IP information world hopefully meet and match the solutions developed by the Information Retrieval world. And if they don't match, it creates the possibility to redirect developments to try and make it match in the (near) future.”
Gerben Gieling
IP Information specialist
Synthon BV
“The IRF Symposium 2007 has been great event where - to my knowledge - for the first time patent experts from industry and scientists in information retrieval from leading universities started a dialogue to overcome the gap between science and industry. The symposium was not only a spot event but as practical result of the dialogue combined working groups of both for different topics were set up and will continue this cooperation throughout the whole year and report back.
Dr. Monika Hanelt
Infocenter GS, Information Services Manager
Agfa Graphics
“I must say I found the symposium very interesting as it discussed retrieval techniques I had never even heard of. It promises to be a good collaboration so long as the two sides can keep an open mind to the goals. Patent searchers have very clear ideas of what they want to retrieve, but need to understand what the search tools are doing so that the retrieval may be relied on. In many cases, the academics do their research on problems that do not relate to the reality of searching patents and thus it can be hard to understand how some of the techniques may be adapted. Highlight was a prototype developed by Matrixware on range searching.”
Susan Helliwell
Patent Searching Manager
Reckitt Benckiser
“IRFS2007 was a fascinating conference. I learnt a lot about information retrieval tools and techniques from the academic and research community. I look forward to seeing new commercial tools for patent searching in the years ahead.”
Teresa Loughbrough
Information Scientist
Unilever Information Group
“The IRF Symposium was an interesting opportunity for patent information specialists to discuss real search problems with IR researchers from academia. I look forward to finding out if any of these challenges have been taken forward.”
Jane List
Information Specialist
The Technology Partnership plc
“IRFS2007 was the remarkable and outstanding event among all patent information conferences I have visited in the past five years. It was truly unique - and very successful as far as I can judge - in its goal to bring experts from the two very distant communities of IR scientists and IP specialists together at one table.
The symposium was exceptionally well organized and a great opportunity to meet interesting people from the in- and outside of the "Patent Information Community", to get a feeling of what the future of patent searching may look like, and which are the technological avenues that will lead us there.”
Rupert Mayer
BU Manager Patent Information
unycom
“From my experience, this was the first time that IP information specialists from several companies from different technological areas spoke with IR people from different universities. It was a great pleasure to see that both parties actually were listening and were trying to understand the problems of the other party. With the growing numbers of published patent abstracts and full-text everybody can understand that in a couple of years we will need new and better search instruments to solve the problems of the IP community. With the knowledge of the Information Retrieval scientists and the professional help of the patent information specialists we can make a next step to reach some of the objectives. I look forward to meeting everybody at the next Symposium and to seeing some of the new developments.”
Henk Tomas
IRF IP Expert Committee
Senior Information Specialist, Consultant in IP Information Retrieval
IP Search Services - Tomas
Testimonials from the IR World
“It was great to see the beginning of a debate between IP specialists and IR researchers. It was remarkable how the structure of the symposium encouraged an engagement between the two communities. It constitutes an excellent basis for the next symposium.”
C.J. van Rijsbergen
Chairman of the IRF Scientific Board
Professor
Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow
“IP and IR are domains of today strategic importance having much to share. Through conferences and working groups, this first IRF symposium was a needed and excellent opportunity for the IP and IR communities to meet and exchange complementary knowledge and experience. Conferences within sessions combining renowned specialists from both sides were of high scientific and technical standard, and triggered very interesting and fruitful discussions within the working groups. Last but not least, we enjoyed a superb organization which paid every efforts to ease the communication between the two communities and produce a successful event and durable contacts. Thanks also to Vienna, an impressive and hospitable place to meet and work.”
Yves Chiaramella
IRF Scientific Board
Professor Emeritus, Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics
Université Joseph Fourier, CLIPS-IMAG, Grenoble
“I found the first IRF a very good experience, where many current issues and relevant approaches were discussed in a well organized forum, thereby allowing for useful cross-fertilization amongst specialists of diverse disciplines. Many concerns have their roots in language issues, especially when dealing with cross-lingual information processing across non-typologically similar languages. I was very pleased to see a very good beginning on fruitful discussions.”
Benjamin T’sou
Professor of Linguistics and Asian Languages, Director of Research Centre
City University of Hong Kong, Language Information Sciences Research Centre
“I found the conference very interesting. As a researcher in information retrieval I was amazed at the number of challenging practical issues in relation to building effective patent retrieval systems. I was most surprised by the use of Boolean retrieval.
The event was extremely well organized and had class.”
Peter Bruza
Professor
Queensland University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology
“The 2007 IRF Symposium was one of the most stimulating research meetings I have attended. The programme was splendid with a range of excellent presentations. The whole event served as a great opportunity for scientists and practitioners to start a new venture.”
Dr. Ian Ruthven
Senior Lecturer
Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde
"An excellent conference with participants from a very wide range of backgrounds."
Peter Willett
Professor
Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield
“The 1st IRFS Symposium was excellently organised. There were great opportunities for both communities to exchange experiences and discuss ideas, also to make new contacts and start new co-operations.”
Sándor Dominich
George Polya Professor
University of Pannonia
“IRFS2007 was a very well organized meeting of the IP and IR worlds that were until then practically separated and then found out that they had extensive common ground. Very inspiring for my research.”
Cornelis H.A. Koster
Professor
Department of Computer Science, Radboud University of Nijmegen
“Good kickoff event. Hope to see the symposium to have good global coverage.”
Kilnam Chon
IRF Scientific Board
Professor
Computer Science Department, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
“The program was extremely well organized. The participants were enthusiastic and highly interactive. The eclectic mix of the participants was very refreshing. One got the feeling that this was more a beginning of a movement than a symposium.”
Arcot Desai Narasimhalu
IRF Scientific Board
Associate Dean
School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University
“IRF Symposium'07: Excellent organization. Technical conferences usually don't have users attending. The symposium was unique in my experience in having many users and it was a good opportunity to listen and to learn about their real world problems and to communicate to them potential solutions.”
R. Manmatha
Research Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts
“IRFS2007 was for me an introduction to a fairly new area, PIR (Patent IR). I have been to some degree in touch with PIR / user side through a PhD project I'm supervising. IRFS however was for me an overview on a range of PIR problems, some amenable for Lab-oriented research, some for user-oriented. Noisy OCR text, cross-language issues, number-and-range searching, structured documents, interface issues, interaction/session evaluation, and ontologies pop up in my mind as interesting areas 6 months after the event.
Of course it was very nice to have an opportunity to meet so many usual suspects in IR as well.”
Kalervo Jarvelin
Academy Professor
University of Tampere
“IRFS2007 brought together communities which rarely meet, but who both attack the same problem from different angles: the computational linguistics group who have applied their tools against patent databases, and information professionals who manipulate the same databases with an eye to providing service to their clients. The confrontation of what is desired by clients and what is possible by machine was enlightening to both groups.”
Dr. Gregory Grefenstette
Senior Researcher
CEA LIST