Information Retrieval Meets Information Visualization - PROMISE Winter School 2012, Revised Tutorial Lectures

In the context of the European Union (EU)-funded research project PROMISE (Participative Research labOratory for Multimedia and Multilingual Information Systems Evaluation), a winter school was organized in the small ski resort of Zinal, Valais, Switzerland during January 23-27, 20121. PROMISE aims at advancing the experimental evaluation of complex mul- timedia and multilingual information systems in order to support individuals, commercial entities, and communities who design, develop, employ, and improve such complex systems. The overall goal of PROMISE is to deliver a unified envi- ronment collecting data, knowledge, tools, methodologies, and to help the user community which is involved in the experimental evaluation. The title of the winter school was From Information Retrieval to Information Visualization and the goal was to bring together these two research domains that are currently quite separated but have an important potential to help each other in advancing the fields. Indeed, the school was attended by participants who came from one domain or the other and offered them the possibility of starting to acquire cross-disciplinary competencies. Interestingly enough, the school turned out to be a brainstorming and discussion opportunity also for the lecturers, since they had the chance to meet colleagues from a quite different field with their own perspectives on a ground of shared topics and issues, such as how to envision models and design systems around user needs, how to consider the user interaction and context, how to conduct evaluation, and so on.