Information Retrieval Specialist Group
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The Information Retrieval Specialist Group (IRSG) or BCS-IRSG is a Specialist Group of the British Computer Society concerned with supporting communication between researchers and practitioners, promoting the use of Information Retrieval (IR) methods in industry and raising public awareness. There is a newsletter called The Informer, an annual European Conference (ECIR), and continual organisation and sponsorship of conferences, workshops and seminars. The current chair is Dr. Andy MacFarlane.[citation needed]
European Conference on Information Retrieval
Organising ECIR is one of the major activities of the Information Retrieval Specialist Group. The conference began in 1979 and has grown to become one of the major Information Retrieval conferences alongside SIGIR receiving hundreds of paper and poster submissions every year from around the world.[citation needed] ECIR was initially established by the IRSG under the name "Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research", and held in the UK until 1997. It was renamed ECIR in 2003 to better reflect its status as an international conference.