DoSSIER

The education and training of early stage researchers is a key objective of the DoSSIER EU project. In that context, from 25 to 30 of September 2022, DoSSIER, in collaboration with the Intelligent Systems Laboratory of the International Hellenic University, organized in Olympiada (Chalkidiki, Greece) the 1st DoSSIER Training School as an internal training event.

The 1st DoSSIER Training School was a week-long event consisting of a series of lectures and seminars. The school was intended for PhD students researchers that are funded by the project, conducting research in the area of Domain Specific Systems for Information Extraction and Retrieval. The aim of the school was to give grounding in core research topics (e.g. IR Experimentation), but also to provide training in other subjects relevant to their research activities (e.g. Licensing practices, Search in Industry settings). The agenda of the entire training school is available here<link>. The school contained a few lecturers from advisors inside the DoSSIER network but mostly from invited speakers who are recognized experts in the field. In numbers, the school consisted of 12 talks presented by professors and researchers from several countries: 

1. Katriina Byström: OlsoMet, Faculty of Social Sciences
2. Roberto Cornacchia: Spinque
3. Nicola Ferro: University of Padua, Department of Information Engineering
4. Norbert Fuhr: Universität Duisburg-Essen, Informatik und Angewandte Kognitionswissenschaft
5. Marianna Katrakazi: Legal associate ATHENA RC
6. Petr Knoth: Open University, Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics Group & RSA Data Science Studio
7. Udo Kruschwitz: Universität Regensburg, Information Science
8. Antonis Makropoulos: Contextflow
9. Andreas Rauber: Technische Universität Wien, Institute of Information and Software Engineering
10. Elaine Toms: University of Sheffield, Management School
11. Theodora Tsikrika: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, Information Technologies Institute
12. Jakub Zavrel: Zeta Alpha

In total 13 PhD students attended the school, but also discussed and coordinated their efforts to develop a search engine prototype for domain-specific tasks in a scheduled session. A very special moment during the school was the panel discussion that was organized in Ancient Stagira which is an important archeological site only 0.5 km from the current settlement of Olympiada. Ancient Stagira is the birthplace of Aristotle, probably the greatest and most influential thinker of all times and the first genuine scientist in history. The subject of the panel discussion was “Do we need academia in AI?” and several opinions were presented in a very interesting and vibrant way. 

As the summer school reached its end, after five days of intense attendance and tutoring, the general feeling was very positive and pleasant, making the 1st DoSSIER Training School a very successful school.

Finally we had our first in person event to meet all the ESRs and advisors of the DoSSIER project! On the first day, Suzan Verberne gave an interesting tutorial about Natural Language Processing with a focus on data preprocessing, data annotation process and Named Entity Recognition. In order to focus on the skills which most of us interest, Suzan did a questionnaire beforehand and selected the topics. The tutorial started with the introduction of common data preprocessing steps and also for which tasks which data preprocessing makes sense. Along with an exercise to compute the Levenshtein distance we concluded this chapter. Personally for me the most interesting part was the part about how to do annotation campaigns, which possible options for attaining labels there are and the final exercise with the interrater agreement. I think this lecture will give good guidance for all ESRs in the project who wang to do their own annotation campaign. Suzan ended the tutorial with the topic of Named Entity Recognition and with introducing first neural networks for this task.

You can find the slides of her presentation on her website of her course Text Mining which she teaches in Leiden University.

https://tmr.liacs.nl/TM.html

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced quite a lot of problems in almost any research project. We organize this online induction workshop to establish and coordinate communication and collaboration between all project members and PhD students and signify full propelling of the project. The program  of the Induction Workshop:

Day 1: 23 November 2020 (9:00-13:30)

Project introduction

Self-introductions of ESRs and supervisors

Doing a PhD - what does it mean?

Day 2: 27 November 2020  (9:00-13:15)

Student only break-out session

Planning

Introduction to the PGCertRPD and its requirements

Day 3: 7 December 2020 (9:00-13:15)

Parallel break-out groups by deliverables currently being prepared

Health break-out group discussion

Legal break-out group discussion

Innovation break-out group discussion

On Feb 19, 2021, the "Introduction to HCI" workshop was conducted by Dr. Martin Halvey from the University of Strathclyde and one of the DoSSIER advisors to the DOSSIER early-stage researchers. The one-day workshop covered these main topics: What is HCI; Experimental Design; and Investigation Techniques. The first part of the workshop was HCI definition and history, also it touched upon the related fields as psychology; Physiology; Medicine; and Ergonomics Sociology.

The second part of the workshop covered the experimental design in HCI and covered in more detail areas related to 'variables', 'task', and 'participants'. Besides, Dr. Halvey talked about ethics as crucial things to look at while designing experiments and how to ensure take into account the rights, safety, and wellbeing of the participants at all times. The final part of the workshops was about the various investigation techniques such as questionnaires; interviews; focus groups; observation; etc. Also, the advantages and disadvantages of each one of the mentioned techniques.

Dr. Halvey covered a wide range of important concepts that are crucial for the DOSSIER Ph.D. students to learn about at this stage of their careers. Especially that many of them will work on designing experiments and collecting data themselves. Learning about these concepts at the early stage of their career definitely would help them carry high-quality research and save them a lot of time. 

On the 10th of March 2021, the “DoSSIER Doing Research - Part 1” workshop was held for 15 Ph.D. students who take part in the Domain-Specific Systems for Information Extraction and Retrieval (DoSSIER) project. This workshop is one of a series of training workshops that covers variety of helpful and important topics for the early-stage researchers of the DoSSIER project.

The workshop was led by two of the project’s advisors: Arjen P. de Vries and Leif Azzopardi. Many questions were discussed during the interesting and insightful workshop which led to a very interesting discussion. Some of the raised questions were:  what does it mean to be a good researcher? what is a scientific process? And how to make an impact in the field of information retrieval as a young researcher? One of the answers was to rely on existing research to improve on it but also produce something new. Early-stage researchers can produce helpful results that may later be used by industries and by other researchers.

During the four-hour workshop, the students were divided into four breakout groups to discuss different questions such as "researchers' goals of researching", "research collaboration with other researchers", and "doing internships in the different companies". Many crucial points were discussed regarding the issues that early-stage researchers might face during their internships, and how to prepare in advance to minimize the chance of having any issue or conflict of interest with the hosted companies. Moreover, there was an emphasis on finding the right research questions that make their research valuable.

Leaving aside serious matters, the atmosphere of the workshop was fun and there were lots of joking around. After all, research is also about having fun, meeting new people, making new friends, visiting different countries (when allowed), understanding other cultures, and enjoying the research process. Students left the workshop looking forward to part 2 of “DoSSIER Doing Research" workshop.

DoSSIER is going to organize and host the 14th European Summer School on Information Retrieval. The school will take place in Vienna, between August 28 to September 2. 

The European Summer School on Information Retrieval (ESSIR) is held regularly, providing high-quality teaching of Information Retrieval (IR) and advanced IR topics to an audience of researchers and research students. The mission of the school is to enable students to learn about modern research challenges and methods on IR and related disciplines; to stimulate scientific research and collaboration in these fields; and to grow a community of researchers, students, and industry professionals working on IR with collaborations all around the world.

The Training School is going to be a week-long event consisting of a series of lectures and seminars. More details about the agenda, the lecturers and the Symposium on Future Directions in Information Access (FDIA) can be found on the ESSIR 2023 web site (https://2023.essir.eu/).