On a Saturday evening, I was looking for something to take my 4-year-old daughter to. Movies were right out, being that it’s just really big TV with pop & popcorn. No, we needed something fun. The Mariners may have been a good choice, but it being your standard cold, rainy August evening, a night under the roof at Safeco didn’t appeal. So Rollerderby is was! Laura and I decided to go to the season championship bout of the Rat City Rollergirls, with Grave Danger taking on the 2006 champions, Sockit Wenches. Now, to be clear, this is not Rollerball, there are not motorcycles, and there isn’t a ball being tossed into a hoop to score points. It’s just a bunch of ladies on roller skates and flashy costumes, skating around a flat track, with one lady on each team trying to lap the other team for points.

Oh, and it’s full contact. They did keep that bit of Rollerball.

We arrived about 4:30 PM and the crowd was starting to arrive. The roller girls arrived on the Seafair Pirates’ boat to much applause. Laura was quite excited and we were having fun with the camera - there’s the self-portrait with Laura in my lap.

There was an opening half of Derby Liberation Front vs Throttle Rockets - the #3 and #4 teams of the 4-team league. Then we had the first half of the championship bout. What does it look like? Well, turns out you can’t capture much with a POS camera. It looks sorts like this:

Turns out the action is fast, so unless you have some real glass, you’re getting lots of blurry, dark pictures. As you can see, the women are in flashy costumes sporting fancy skates, typically some fishnet or leather stockings, and plenty of tattoos. These aren’t cheerleaders out there. They don’t need cheerleaders. These are women who have come to play and throw the occasional elbow. And why not? It’s four minors until you’re forced to sit in the penalty box for a minute!

The crowd was also into the look. We were in the Grave Danger section, and many of the fans were wearing red with horns. Here’s a picture of the woman next us.

Laura actually took the picture (and a great many others)… she’s discovered the joys of digital cameras, and was having a blast taking all sorts of random shots, including a number where she was busy flashing herself…

All in all, it was a fun event for Laura and I, although we bailed at intermission as she was getting tired (it had been a long day). There were a decent number of other kids there too, and it was fairly family friendly. Laura just loves the costumes and tattoos… surprisingly though, I don’t think she paid much attention to the actual event taking place in the middle. It was much more interesting to people watch with a camera!

The tragic case of Baby Lilly, whose newborn body was found by the River Alne in Britain, came to a close today. From the Stratford Observer:

A JUDGE has sentenced the mother of a newborn found dumped in the River Alne to two years’ probation.

Rachel Davies, 26, of Wharrage Road, Alcester, had admitted at a hearing ahead of today’s sentencing at Warwick Crown Court to a charge of concealment of birth.

She said she had no idea she was pregnant until she went into labour one night in the home she shared with her parents. She told the court she gave birth whilst alone in the kitchen and panicked when the child, later named Baby Lilly by police, appeared lifeless.

Davies, who worked at Mothercare in Leamington at the time, put the baby’s body in her car overnight before calling work the next morning to say she was going to be late. She drove to Great Alne where she dumped Lilly in a plastic bag in the River Alne just off Wood Lane, sometime between January and May last year

A 13-year-old boy out walking with his family on May 11 2006 discovered the body along with blood-stained clothes and towels also in the bag.

Lilly had suffered significant injuries including a fractured skull and Warwickshire Police launched a murder inquiry. It was later discontinued when further evidence came to light suggesting the newborn had been stillborn.

More than six months later Davies was traced through Lilly’s father. She initially denied any involvement but DNA proved she was the baby’s mother.

I’m not sure why this case just stuck in my head for the past two years, but it did. There’s a fair bit of discussion on my original post from about a year ago.

So finally, at long last, closure.

In theory, I would have had more blog entries while at SIGIR last week. However, a number of things prevented me from doing anything:

1. Wireless barely worked during the conference;
2. The talks were interesting and I wanted to pay attention;
3. I decided to talk to other delegates during the evening;
4. I was lazy.

Luckily, there’s nothing like an 8 hour flight without network access to get things done.

Overall
SIGIR is clearly on the ascent. It’s not a huge shock… with all the competition in search and clear monetization, a ton of effort is going into the area from both academic and commercial interests. SIGIR now runs 3 paper tracks per session, and the proceedings clearly show that it’s now a much bigger conference than it was even 2 years ago. Last year’s SIGIR in Seattle drew record attendance, but people thought perhaps that was a fluke given how many Microsoft employees attended (over 100), given it was in Microsoft’s backyard. Well, this year was no different, and Amsterdam is quite a ways away from Redmond. Nonetheless, Microsoft still had about 50 employees present. Google had about 25, Yahoo maybe 20… so, clearly there’s some commercial interest.

Big Themes
There were a number of big themes at the conference this year. Gaining a fair amount of prominence were both Web IR (two sessions) and Learning to Rank (two sessions). There was also a lot more on Evaluation (three sessions) this year than in the past.

Papers
Here are a number of the papers I found interesting and would recommend reading. This probably shows more my biases in areas vs some ordering of SIGIR papers. Just as it was easiest, I’ve ordered these in the order they are in the SIGIR Proceedings.

Reliable Information Retrieval Evaluation with Incomplete and Biased Judgements [p. 63]
S. Büttcher, C. L. A. Clarke, P. C. K. Yeung (University of Waterloo)
I. Soboroff (National Institute of Standards and Technology)

Alternatives to Bpref [p. 71]
T. Sakai (NewsWatch, Inc.)

Fast Generation of Result Snippets in Web Search [p. 127]
A. Turpin, Y. Tsegay (RMIT University)
D. Hawking (CSIRO ICT Centre)
H. E. Williams (Microsoft Corporation)

The Influence of Caption Features on Clickthrough Patterns in Web Search [p. 135]
C. L. A. Clarke (University of Waterloo)
E. Agichtein (Emory University)
S. Dumais, R. W. White (Microsoft Research)

Information Re-Retrieval: Repeat Queries in Yahoo’s Logs [p. 151]
J. Teevan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
E. Adar (University of Washington)
R. Jones, M. A. S. Potts (Yahoo! Research)

Studying the Use of Popular Destinations to Enhance Web Search Interaction [p. 159]
R. W. White, M. Bilenko, S. Cucerzan (Microsoft Research)

Multiple-Signal Duplicate Detection for Search Evaluation [p. 223]
S. Huffman, A. Lehman, A. Stolboushkin, H. Wong-Toi, F. Yang, H. Roehrig (Google Inc.)

Robust Classification of Rare Queries Using Web Knowledge [p. 231]
A. Broder, M. Fontoura, E. Gabrilovich, A. Joshi, V. Josifovski, T. Zhang (Yahoo! Research)

Random Walks on the Click Graph [p. 239]
N. Craswell, M. Szummer (Microsoft Research Cambridge)

A Support Vector Method for Optimizing Average Precision [p. 271]
Y. Yue, T. Finley, F. Radlinski, T. Joachims (Cornell University)

A Regression Framework for Learning Ranking Functions Using Relative Relevance Judgments [p. 287]
Z. Zheng (Yahoo! Inc.)
H. Zha (Georgia Institute of Technology)
K. Chen, G. Sun (Yahoo! Inc.)

On the Robustness of Relevance Measures with Incomplete Judgments [p. 359]
T. Bompada, C.-C. Chang, J. Chen, R. Kumar, R. Shenoy (Yahoo!)

Test Theory for Assessing IR Test Collections [p. 367]
D. Bodoff (University of Haifa)
P. Li (State University of New York at Buffalo)

Strategic System Comparisons via Targeted Relevance Judgments [p. 375]
A. Moffat, W. Webber (The University of Melbourne)
J. Zobel (RMIT University)

Relaxed Online SVMs for Spam Filtering [p. 415]
D. Sculley, G. M. Wachman (Tufts University)

Know Your Neighbors: Web Spam Detection using the Web Topology [p. 423]
C. Castillo, D. Donato, A. Gionis, V. Murdock (Yahoo! Research Barcelona)
F. Silvestri (ISTI-CNR)

DiffusionRank: A Possible Penicillin for Web Spamming [p. 431]
H. Yang, I. King, M. R. Lyu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

HITS on the Web: How Does it Compare? [p. 471]
M. Najork (Microsoft Research)
H. Zaragoza (Yahoo! Research Barcelona)
M. Taylor (Microsoft Research)

HITS Hits TREC - Exploring IR Evaluation Results with Network Analysis [p. 479]
S. Mizzaro (University of Udine)
S. Robertson (Microsoft Research)

How Well Does Result Relevance Predict Session Satisfaction? [p. 567]
S. B. Huffman, M. Hochster (Google, Inc.)

Final Thoughts
The research going into SIGIR is really, really good and useful. This isn’t to say that previous work wasn’t; rather, SIGIR is moving into a world no longer completely dominated by the TREC competitive evaluation model and into a world where research is being done on real systems, collections, queries, and people. This is fantastic, as it will directly lead to improvements on systems that we all use.