The Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP) at Dublin City University is bringing together fifteen search engine experts to Dublin City University in September for a Summer School an Information Retrieval. The fifteen experts are from Research Institutes and Universities throughout Europe, and includes a previous head of research at Google as well as those regarded as being the founding fathers of information retrieval.

ESSIR 2005, the European Summer School on Information Retrieval is a bi-annual event, which has previously been hosted in the UK, Italy and most recently France in 2003. One hundred graduate and post-doctoral students from all over Europe and beyond will attend the week-long Summer school to hear the experts give lectures on topics such as Web Search Engines, Multimedia Search, and Personalising Search Engines. The target audience of the Summer School are PhD students, post-doctoral researchers and academic and industrial researchers.

Commenting on the Summer School, Professor Alan Smeaton, director of the CDVP and host of the Summer School said:

"Information Retrieval is the basic technology which underpins all web search engines including Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search and to have Europe's leading researchers in Dublin giving an advanced course on how this technology works both now, and into the future, is very exciting."

Ireland is a centre of activity for web search engines with the major search engine companies including Google and Yahoo! having a strong base here. Bringing young talented researchers and acknowledged experts together in Dublin will serve to further increase Ireland's profile and influence in the field of search engine development.

The ESSIR 2005 Summer school will run from 5-9 September 2005 in Dublin City University. It is being organised and hosted by the Centre for Digital Video Processing, part of the Adaptive Information Cluster at Dublin City University.

About ESSIR 2005
Further information on ESSIR is available at http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/ESSIR2005

About CDVP
The Centre for Digital Video Processing is a University-designated research centre of 45 researchers, all funded from competitive research sources outside the University. The centre conducts basic and applied research into the analysis, indexing and browsing/search of large archives of video information in applications including access to personal video, TV, movies, CCTV, environmental monitoring, and surveillance video. For further information on the CDVP see
http://www.cdvp.dcu.ie/

About AIC
The Adaptive Information Cluster is a cross-disciplinary research cluster that has been awarded 5.6 million by the Science Foundation of Ireland. The mission of the AIC is to integrate research on adaptive sensor networks, content extraction and adaptive utilization and to collaborate with industry partners and state bodies to develop applications in a variety of areas. AIC has a particular strength in personalised searching, including personalised searching of the web. Further information on the AIC is at http://www.adaptiveinformation.ie/

For further information related to this release contact:

Dr. Cathal Gurrin (until August 29th) or
Prof. Alan Smeaton (after August 29th)
Centre for Digital Video Processing
Dublin City University
Tel: + 353 1 7005234 (Gurrin)
Tel: + 353 1 7005262 (Smeaton)