FIRE 2023

Call for participation

We solicit talk proposals covering how information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP) are used in industrial settings. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Open problems and challenges in industry.
• Position and reflection on the current and future state of IR in practice.
• Novel applications of IR/NLP in real-world situations.
• Building IR/NLP systems with an emphasis on trust and safety: Combating misinformation spread; Building privacy preserving retrieval systems; Minimizing social harms; Ensuring fairness and equity
• Innovative approaches used in deployed systems and products.
• System design case-studies from industry practitioners, identifying best practices and design principles for learning systems, scalability aspects.
• Metrics and measurement techniques used at scale to understand performance of industrial systems.
• Creating a connection with academia to solve interesting problems, including presentations from academics spending time in industry, or vice-versa, covering insights for other practitioners.
• Industrial research success stories: from research to production

We encourage proposals from small and large companies, as well as from startups and spin-offs from both universities and large companies. Proposals discussing domain specific challenges are also welcome.

Submission Guidelines

Proposals should be at most 4 pages (excluding references) and must follow ACM SIG's template available on https://authors.acm.org/proceedings/production-information/taps-production-workflow. The only accepted format of submissions is PDF. Submissions should include:

• Title and abstract
• Proposed content of the talk
• Relevance to above themes and the FIRE community
• Speaker's bio

Submissions are not anonymous (reviewing will be single-blind) and should contain speaker details. Proposals which do not conform to the requirements are likely to be rejected without review.

All proposals should be submitted via Microsoft CMT: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/FIRE2023

Presentation and Publication

The presentation format will be decided based on submissions and interest to the wider community, and is likely to be a mix of short and long presentations. A condition of acceptance is that the presenter commits to attend FIRE 2023 in-person but we will try to accommodate those who cannot travel due to health, visa, or other hard constraints. Accepted proposals will be published as part of the conference proceedings.

Important dates 

Note: All submission deadlines are 11:59 PM AoE Time Zone (Anywhere on Earth).

Industry Track Coordinator 

• Bhaskar Mitra (Microsoft Research)