LL 2013 - International Workshop on Living Labs for Information Retrieval Evaluation

Evaluation is a central aspect of information retrieval (IR) research. In the past few years, a new evaluation methodology known as living labs has been proposed as a way for researchers to be able to perform in-situ evaluation. The basic idea of living labs for IR is that rather than individual research groups independently developing experimental search infrastructures and gathering their own groups of test searchers for IR evaluations, a central and shared experimental environment is developed to facilitate the sharing of resources. Living labs would offer huge benefits to the community, such as: availability of, potentially larger, cohorts of real users and their behaviours, e.g. querying behaviours, for experiment purposes; cross-comparability across research centres; and greater knowledge transfer between industry and academia, when industry partners are involved. The need for this methodology is further amplified by the increased reliance of IR approaches on proprietary data; living labs are a way to bridge the data divide between academia and industry. Progress towards realising actual living labs has nevertheless been limited. There are many challenges to be overcome before the benefits associated with living labs for IR can be realised, including challenges associated with living labs architecture and design, hosting, maintenance, security, privacy, participant recruiting, and scenarios and tasks for use development. In this workshop we seek to bring together for the first time people interested in progressing the living labs for IR evaluation methodology.
Organizers
Krisztian Balog, University of Stavanger, Norway
David Elsweiler, University of Regensburg, Germany
Evangelos Kanoulas, Google, Switzerland
Liadh Kelly, Dublin City University, Ireland
Mark Smucker, University of Waterloo, Canada
Worshop website: http://ll2013.dcu.ie/