DESIRES is a biennial retreat-like systems-oriented conference, complementary in its mission to the mainstream Information Access and Retrieval conferences like SIGIR, ECIR and other conferences focusing on specific aspects of IR such as ICTIR or CHIIR, emphasizing the innovative technological aspects of search and retrieval systems.

DESIRES gathers researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry to discuss the latest innovative and visionary ideas in the field.  DESIRES is inspired by CIDR (http://cidrdb.org/)

DESIRES mainly encourages papers about innovative and risky information access and retrieval system ideas, systems-building experience and insight, resourceful experimental studies, provocative position statements, and new application domains. DESIRES also welcomes contributions focusing on implementation details, successful or failed reproducibility attempts, technological breakthroughs and new uses of old ideas. At DESIRES running demos/prototypes and war stories are more than welcome. Moreover, industrial and "real-world" experiences play a central role in DESIRES. For instance, papers discussing how well-established research ideas are implemented and used by industries and in commercial products are encouraged.

Submission Guidelines

DESIRES is a single-track conference. To encourage authors to submit only their best work, each person can be an author or co-author of only a single paper or demo. That is, authors can submit only 1 (one) paper. 

DESIRES invites three kinds of contributions: 

• Papers (up to 6 pages). Papers usually lack rigorous frameworks, simulations of performance, or prototype implementations but present a radical departure from conventional approaches that enables new applications. Accepted full papers will typically be presented in 20 minutes with 10 minutes for questions and discussion. There will be a discussant for each paper that will read the paper in advance and prepare questions (plus questions from the audience).
• Prototypes (up to 6 pages). The prototype descriptions generally are a detailed report on successes and mistakes. Accepted prototype papers will typically be presented in 10 minutes with 5 minutes for questions and discussion.
• Abstracts (1 page). Ideas that are too half-baked for a paper or demo proposal are good candidates for an abstract. Any author of a paper or prototype demo may additionally submit one abstract. Abstracts are expected to have a single author. Accepted abstracts are allocated 2 minutes in a gong-show style.

Format: ACM SIGIR classic format:  https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template-16dec2016

Committees

General Chairs

• Omar Alonso (Microsoft, USA)
• Gianmaria Silvello (University of Padua, Italy)

Advisory board

• Maristella Agosti (University of Padua, Italy)
• Ricardo Baeza-Yates (NTENT, USA)
• Bruce Croft (University of Massachusetts, USA)
• Susan Dumais (Microsoft, USA)
• Norbert Fuhr (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)
• Donna Harman (NIST, USA)
• Kalervo Jarvelin (University of Tampere, Finland)
• Marc Najork (Google, USA)
• Jan Pedersen (Twitter, USA)
• Gerhard Weikum (MPI, Germany) 

Programme committee 

• James Allan (University of Massachusetts, USA) 
• Barla Cambazoglu (NTENT, USA) 
• Diego Ceccarelli (Bloomberg, UK) 
• Jeffrey Dalton (Google, USA) 
• Claudia Hauff (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands) 
• Nicola Ferro (University of Padua, Italy) 
• Evgenyi Gabrilovich (Google, USA)
• Krishna Gummadi (MPI-SWS, Germany)
• Vasileios Kandylas (Microsoft, USA) 
• Bhaskar Mitra (Microsoft, UK) 
• Nicola Montecchio (Spotify, Germany)
• Edgar Meij (Bloomberg, UK)
• Jussi Karlgren (Gavagai & KTH, Sweden) 
• Emre Kiciman (Microsoft, USA)
• Andreas Rauber (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)
• Tony Russell-Rose (UXLabs, UK) 
• Tetsuya Sakai (Waseda University, Japan) 
• Mark Sanderson (RMIT, Australia) 
• Sunita Sarawagi (IIT Bombay, India)
• Ian Soboroff (NIST, USA)
• Paul Thomas (Microsoft, USA) 
• Andrew Trotman (eBay) 
• Arjen de Vries (Radboud University, The Netherlands)
• Ingmar Weber (QCRI, Qatar)
• Wouter Weerkamp (904 Labs, The Netherlands) 
• Cong Yu (Google Research, USA)
• Justin Zobel (University of Melbourne, Australia)

Publication

The accepted (and presented) papers will be published as CEUR-WS proceedings freely available on-line: http://ceur-ws.org/ (Indexed by DBLP and Scopus).
Modified or incremental versions of the papers included in the DESIRES proceedings can be submitted to other venues. The scope of DESIRES is discussing ideas, not tying them.

Venue

DESIRES 2018 will be held at the University Residential Centre of Bertinoro (Ce.U.B.), Italy: http://www.ceub.it/default.asp?id=346#.WQ4LgVPygWo

The Ce.U.B. is active since 1994 in the field of vocational training, conferences, congresses, and lectures. Ce.U.B. is a vocational training center of the University of Bologna and it is located in the ancient town of Bertinoro (Forlì-Cesena). The Ce.U.B complex is a former fortress (dating back to the 10th century) and a historical landmarks considered one of the most important monumental complexes of the Region.

DESIRES 2018 is organized under the Bertinoro international Center for informatics (BiCi) umbrella (http://www.bici.eu/index.html). BiCi is an association whose mission is to foster cutting-edge research and advanced education in Computer Science.

Keynotes

The first confirmed keynote speaker is Jimmy Lin, Professor and the David R. Cheriton Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.

(Tentative) Title of the keynote: Rocket Ships, V8, and Other Batsh*t Crazy Ideas in Information Retrieval

Sponsors

DESIRES is sponsored by Google.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to Omar Alonso (omar.alonso@microsoft.com) or Gianmaria Silvello (gianmaria.silvello@unipd.it)