Programme
You will find below an overview of the programme.
1st IRF Scientific Conference
Monday 31 May 2010
The IRF Scientific Forum
This conference provides a multi-disciplinary, scientific forum for researchers, especially those using the IRF research infrastructure. The focus lies on large scale research projects and research activities related to real industry cases in the fields of information retrieval, natural language processing, semantic web technologies and large-scale computing.
Strategic Seminar
Tuesday 1 June 2010
Using IP as an indicator of R&D strategy
This one-day seminar will offer concrete cost-effective IP optimisation strategies from acknowledged experts on the best way of managing intellectual property and the performance of R&D.
IRF Symposium
Tuesday 1 June 2010, afternoon
Tutorials and practice class: The workflow paradigm
This half-day session will on the one hand take IR scientists through the different steps of an exhaustive patent search process and on the other hand, give IP experts an insight into the various functionalities of visual workflows. Both groups will then be brought together to experiment with example workflows.
Welcome reception
Wednesday 2 June 2010
What If the Web Really Worked for Science? Reimagining Data Policy and Intellectual Property.
Keynote speaker: James Boyle, Duke Law School
Evaluation methodologies: Towards a quality standard?
Chairs: Mark Sanderson, University of Sheffield and Teresa Loughbrough, Unilever
The opening session is dedicated to evaluation and will present the results of a systematic tool evaluation as well as a new approach for assessing the quality of patent data sets.
The topic of evaluation will remain ubiquitous during the symposium with parallel workshops and a prototype evaluation class at the exhibition.
Speakers and schedule
Interfacing: Breaking the cycle of command line use?
Chairs: Joemon Jose, University of Glasgow and Anthony Trippe, 3LP Advisors
This session will present new approaches to answer the specific needs of patent information experts for sophisticated user interfaces, e.g. for conducting searches without the use of rigid forms or lists of individual commands, and show examples of meaningful collaboration between IR scientists and IP professionals.
Speakers and schedule
Gala dinner
Thursday 3 June 2010
Cross-lingual patent retrieval and translation: Dreams and reality
Chairs: Jian-Yun Nie, University of Montreal and Karim Benzineb, Simple Shift
Besides identifying the real needs for multilingualism in patent search, this session will show the contextual impact in cross-lingual searches and propose answers based on emerging cross-lingual retrieval techniques.
Semantic annotation: Nearer to market?
Chairs: Hamish Cunningham, University of Sheffield and Gerald Landl, voestalpine Stahl GmbH
This session will build on the scientific presentations at previous IRF Symposiums and will move on to look at recent industry-oriented prototypes. It will focus on three areas: measurements, biomedical entities and dependency triples.
Speakers and schedule
Workshop 1: CLEF-IP and TREC-CHEM evaluation tracks
Workshop 2: Other evaluation tracks –TREC legal
Friday 4 June 2010
Image retrieval: Light at the end of the tunnel?!
Chairs: Monika Hanelt, Agfa Graphics and Stefanos Vrochidis, Informatics and Telematics Institute, Greece
This session will look into the challenges related to the retrieval of technical drawings as well as table extraction from patent documents in pdf format, and link to potential solutions from the field of trademark recognition.
Speakers and schedule
Chemical patents: Towards genuinely effective searching?
Chairs: Peter Willett, University of Sheffield and Stephen Adams, Magister Ltd.
This session will discuss different approaches to the indexing of chemical patents and present some state-of-the-art technologies and open source initiatives.
Speakers and schedule
Wrap-up sessions
Closing reception

