RuSSIR at LINIS

On August 24-28, 2015, the St. Petersburg campus of the Higher School of Economics hosted the 9th Russian Summer School on Information Retrieval. LINIS was the local organizers, and the event was sponsored by Yandex, Mail.Ru, Google, JetBrains, Rambler, RFBR, ESF, and HSE itself. The school is traditionally supervised by ROMIP, the Russian Information Retrieval Evaluation Seminar, and its all-time leader Pavel Braslavsky (Ural Federal University). The school has earned a high reputation over the years, so, as usual, leading international IR researchers applied to teach at RuSSIR, and an international Program Committee selected the best potential courses. Among the researchers who visited RuSSIR were a world leading researcher in text mining Fabrizio Sebastiani, Principal Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, and a trendsetter in graph mining Santo Fornutano, professor at the Aalto University, Espoo, Finland. Graph mining and social networks analysis were a special topic of the current RuSSIR.

This year we hosted the largest RuSSIR in all nine years, with about 140 participants from all over Russian and twenty different countries. They also all passed a competitive selection process and presented their posters and talks at the young researcher conference which is a traditional part of RuSSIR. Although most participants usually come from the computer science background, this year a number of young researchers in social sciences who collaborate with computer scientists in interdisciplinary research, have participated. LINIS was represented by two works co-authored by Sergey Nikolenko; one of them, devoted to mining opinion polarization on Twitter, became one of the six oral presentations, and the other, on text classification, was accepted as a poster.