According to Tetsuya Sakai, who runs information retrieval research throughout greater Asia via a number of front organizations, AIRS 2010 will be hosted by the National Taiwan University in Taipei, which is great, because it gives me an excuse to visit Taipei again. Tetsuya also announced that AIRS is changing its name from the Asian Information Retrieval Symposium to the Asian Information Retrieval Societies conference. The change is a valid one, since AIRS really is a conference, not a symposium (that is, it is an occasion for carrying things together, not a drinking party). However, the name change has had the interesting side effect of bringing into existence a whole new class of organization, namely an Asian Information Retrieval Society.
Japan already has such as society: IPSJ SIG-IFAT (SIG-FI) (pronounced “ipsjsigifatsigfi”). And there is a similar (though of course not Asian) national specialist research group in the UK, the IRSG, which sits under the umbrella of the British Computer Society, and sponsors a number of research initiatives, including AIRS’s European elder sister, ECIR.
Now, I, personally, love organizations. But Australians are generally not very good at them. And, of course, computer scientists are not known for their gregariousness, nor researchers for their love of regulation. So it should come as no surprise that there is no Australian (or Australasian) society for computer science research, let alone a specialist group for information retrieval. There is an Australian Computer Society, but, aside from sponsoring the euphoniously acronymed journal JRPIT, they are almost exclusively a professional (and certificatory) organization. There’s also CORE, but that’s solely a peak body for computer science departments. And, conference-wise, there is ADCS (which, alas, is not a true symposium either), but there’s no standing organization behind that, as can be inferred from the fact that no-one can remember where ADCS 1999 even was, let alone find the web site.
What has, I suppose, happened is that, what research organization energy there is locally has been sucked up into ACM. And that’s great; research is an international activity, and it’s good that Australian researchers are strongly represented in the peak international organization (disproportionately so in SIGIR, at least). But there are specifically Australian issues relating, not so much to research content, but to research context: the relationship with government funding bodies, the abysmally low level of industry research and development in IT, the importance (particularly at this point in history) of building links with Asian research organizations. It seems a pity that there is no membership-based Austral(as)ian research organization to help address these issues.