The Fifth Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval will be held all day on Thursday, October 20th, 2011, at Google's main campus in Mountain View, California. There will be a reception on Wednesday evening before the workshop.

We are very pleased that our keynote speaker this year will be Gary Marchionini, Dean of the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

We are also excited to continue the HCIR Challenge, this year focusing on the problem of information availability, where the seeker faces uncertainty as to whether the information of interest is available at all. The corpus will be the CiteSeer digital library of scientific literature, which contains over 750,000 documents and provides rich meta-data about documents, authors, and citations.

In addition to the Challenge and a small number of research presentations, we will leave plenty of time for what participants have consistently told us that they find extremely valuable: informal discussions, posters and directed group discussions. Our target is to have 60-70 participants.
FORMAT

This year we invite three types of papers: position papers, research papers and challenge reports.

Position papers will be judged based on relevance to HCIR. Idea diversity across all submissions may also be considered. Acceptance of a position paper earns the author(s) admission and the opportunity to present a poster.
Research papers will be peer-reviewed and judged for both research quality and their likelihood to stimulate discussion. Authors of accepted research papers will have the opportunity present their work orally.
Challenge reports will be reviewed based on how well they address the challenge criteria. The winner will be determined live at the workshop.
All papers must adhere to the 4-page limit, and will be reviewed by the workshop organizers and additional reviewers. The revised versions of accepted papers will be produced in hardcopy for attendees and published on the workshop website.

Possible topics for discussion and presentation at the workshop include, but are not limited to:

Novel interaction techniques for information retrieval.
Modeling and evaluation of interactive information retrieval.
Exploratory search and information discovery.
Information visualization and visual analytics.
Applications of HCI techniques to information retrieval needs in specific domains.
Ethnography and user studies relevant to information retrieval and access.
Scale and efficiency considerations for interactive information retrieval systems.
Relevance feedback and active learning approaches for information retrieval.
Demonstrations of systems and prototypes are particularly welcome.

IMPORTANT DEADLINES

Submission deadline: Sunday, July 31
Notification date: Thursday, September 8
WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Robert Capra, UNC Chapel Hill
Gene Golovchinsky, FX Palo Alto Laboratory
Bill Kules, The Catholic University of America
Dan Russell, Google
Catherine Smith, Kent State University
Daniel Tunkelang, LinkedIn
Ryen White, Microsoft Research