Hmmm, bridgy does not (yet?) carry over the quotability settings from Mastodon to Bluesky. Hopefully soon!

RE: https://idf.social/@arjen/115958919692249312 TREC Web track data too old? Join our data challenge based on the OWS.EU project results, and help develop the test collection. Note: you can already use the Open Web Search Curlie 2025 test collection as-is; but through workshop […]

April 2nd at ECIR 2026 in Delft: 3rd International Workshop on Open Web Search #wows2026 https://opensearchfoundation.org/events-osf/wows2026/ With a Web Search data challenge based on OWS-Curlie-2025: The Open Web Search Curlie 2025 Test Collection, details at the OWI corpora dashboard […]

“Unfortunately, immigrants and noncitizens should now assume that anything they share publicly on social media might be surveilled by the government and potentially used against them,” EFF’s Lisa Femia told @borderlessmag.bsky.social.

By Killing Renee Good, ICE Sent a Message to Us All www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/o...

ECIR is pleased to offer Student Support Grants . Applicants must be full-time students. Priority consideration will be given to students with accepted papers and demonstrated financial need. To apply👉 Please complete the form docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... before January 24.

Working on AI, information access, and language technologies in low resource environments? Consider submitting to @acm.org @acmsigir.bsky.social 2026 Low Resource Environments Track: sigir2026.org/en-AU/pages/... #SIGIR2026 #Naarm #Melbourne Catherine Chavula | Monica Landoni | @damianospina.com

Op 18 maart ben ik opnieuw verkiesbaar voor de Nijmeegse raad! Een van mijn speerpunten is digitale onafhankelijkheid. Lees hier waarom dat belangrijker is dan ooit: hear-me.social/@joepbc/1158... Mocht je mijn kandidatuur bij anderen onder de aandacht kunnen brengen wordt dat gewaardeerd! <3

(Also, icyi, here are the 42 papers citing our non-existent paper which includes a "meta-analysis" - often called the evidence "gold standard" - of "LLM effects" in education 🤮 scholar.google.com.vn/scholar?star...)

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

I am hiring a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy. Topics of interest: (i) AI governance/regulation through computational and socio-technical lens, (ii) computational and socio-technical approaches to digital well-being. More information & how to apply:

Are you a PhD student in topics related to User Modelling and Personalization? Check out the #UMAP2026 call for Doctoral Consortium papers! Submission: March 6, 2026 Notification: March 20, 2026 DC Day: June 8th, 2026 Call: www.um.org/umap2026/cal...

🎄PyTerrier Advent 20/25: You can think of every PyTerrier transformer as a function - mapping from one dataframe type to another. This makes them easily cachable, courtesy of pyterrier_caching. We have cache object for retrievers, rerankers, or even indexing-time transformations (e.g. Doc2Query)

A Xmas present arrived early: Our @dagstuhl.de 24352 Manifesto on #Conversational #Agents: A Framework for #Evaluation ( #CAFE) is out! doi.org/10.4230/DagM... We define CONversational Information ACcess ( #CONIAC), propose a world model,+ a Conversational Agents Framework for Evaluation (CAFE).

🎄 PyTerrier Advent 22/25: A more complex pipeline—knowledge-graph–enhanced RAG from our EMNLP 2024 paper TRACE. We build a KG over retrieved docs, then use a transformer to reason over triples for better QA. This pipeline instantiation uses a cache (see 20th advent) on LLM-based KG extraction.

BREAKING: Today, at the Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE 2025) at the Indian Institute of Technology in Varanasi, India, we announced a partnership between #fire2025 and #irrj. There will be an IRRJ special issue on FIRE! 🔥 More information to be shared here soon.

#ECIR2026 notifications were friendly to me 🤗 1. Full paper "Open Web Indexes for Remote Querying" with @gijs#ecir2026and @djoerd. Can we let ppl query the Terabytes of Web Index we collect in #OpenWebSearch.EU in new ways, making good use of Parquet, S3, DuckDB? Turns out the answer is a big YES! […]

Thanks to @wilbowma for raising issue with GenAI features in the ACM DL for premium users. It took a little effort to check this, but by going through our uni library I can access ACM articles as premium user. The screenshot (of a paper by Carsten Eickhoff) […] [Original post on idf.social]

🎖️ Call for Nominations – The Keith van Rijsbergen (KvR) Award 2026 Read more about the award, nomination process, and find the form to submit your nominations here: lnkd.in/emecdsXm #ECIR2026 #InformationRetrieval #Awards #ResearchExcellence ecir2026.eu/calls/keith-...

Onderzoek van politicologen wijst stelselmatig uit dat kiezers niet verrechtsen. Het is het aanbod dat verrechtst, de positie van politieke leiders. Daarom is de voorzichtige terugkeer van het politieke midden juist nu belangrijk voor de democratie. Mijn column in @nrc.nl www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/...

‘The Democrats Still May Not Understand What They're Dealing With’ - POLITICO https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/10/11/elon-musk-donald-trump-silicon-valley-book-jacob-silverman-00603682 "A simple way to put it is that this is a group of people used to getting everything that they […]

Een sterke, competente vaste kamercommissie Digitale zaken. Dit initiatief van @berthubert.bsky.social vraagt aandacht voor "genoeg kennis in de Tweede Kamer te behouden of te krijgen [zo] dat de commissie ook na de verkiezingen geloofwaardig door kan" #tk2025 nerdvote.nl/diza/

Portland! We're excited to host a semi-secret members' Speakeasy on October 25 🍻 We hope to see you there: eff.org/speakeasy-p...

FT: Deloitte issues refund for error-ridden Australian government report that used AI https://www.ft.com/content/934cc94b-32c4-497e-9718-d87d6a7835ca "The document contained multiple errors, including references and citations to non-existent reports by academics at the universities of Sydney […]

Created a DNS extension for @duckdb.org today: github.com/tobilg/duckd... Hopefully it will be available via the Community Extensions soon!

Insight in the data economy: https://www.404media.co/airlines-sell-5-billion-plane-ticket-records-to-the-government-for-warrantless-searching/ Seems dodgy! Did I get the option to not consent? I don't recall seeing this on my last flight booking.

Building a decentralized, distributed web is vital to finding and preserving information for all, @archive.org founder @brewster.kahle.org tells EFF’s Cindy Cohn and @thejasonkelley.com on the latest episode of “How to Fix the Internet.”

🕊️ Lifetime Achievement Award at #ACL2025NLP A standing ovation for Prof. Kathy McKeown, recipient of the ACL 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award! 🌟

🌟Really excited to share the fourth Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval (SWIRL) report published in SIGIR Forum! Paper 👉🏻 www.johannetrippas.com/papers/tripp... More info 👉🏻 sites.google.com/view/swirl20... #SWIRL2025 #SIGIR2026 #IR #GenAI #Research #CHIIR2026

Barbara Kathmann heeft fantastisch werk gedaan op het gebied van digitalisering en privacy, maar haar indrukwekkende prestaties op deze portefeuille kregen van de kandidatencommissie verrassend genoeg niet de waardering die ze verdienen. Stem daarom op onze strijdbare anti-Musk! #RaiseTheBar

Recording of the OWI launch event from June 6th: https://vimeo.com/1112822052 + Get introduced to the Open Web Index + Learn how to access and use the Open Web index + Licenses and options for raw data access + Use cases for the Open Web Index + Hands-on tutorial on our index access tools […]

Python! https://youtu.be/GfH4QL4VqJ0?si=lT2Y7QhgusMLNctH The Python Documentary. Featuring several CWI ex-colleagues, of course. The premiere is tomorrow on YouTube at 17:00 UTC (that's 19:00 CET for Europeans). It's an hour and 24 minutes long.

If you are attending #SIGIR2025 and #ICTIR2025, come check out our research group's presentations! 😊 We have 14 presentations in total, with at least one every day. 😄 If you want to know more about our group, e.g., the meaning of the Informagus name 😁, do reach out to us. See you in Padua! 😎 ☀️ 🇮🇹

Carte blanche geven aan Israël is een blunder van formaat Mijn column in @nrc.nl www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/...

An 8TB corpus of copyright-free text for training AI models. https://github.com/r-three/common-pile/blob/main/paper.pdf I'm glad somebody has finally done this. The "we need to break copyright or AI won't work argument" feels super-dodgy to me and we can just evaluate whether it's true. 1/n

#dir2025, the 22nd Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval workshop will take place at Radboud University Nijmegen on 27 October 2025! https://informagus.nl/dir2025/

Welcome to the age of $10/month Lakehouses! How to build and run a Lakehouse on top of @cloudflare.social R2 , Cloudflare Containers and Neon Postgres, all backed by the new DuckLake "SQL as Lakehouse" format, via @duckdb.org. tobilg.com/the-age-of-1...

Radboud ICIS research with KU Leuven revealed a huge tracking scandal today: https://localmess.github.io/ Meta and Yandex (ab-)used Android's fuzzy rules on using localhost to track your browsing patterns without your consent. Yandex even owns a domain to hide these access patterns. Read more […]

This is genius. If I’m understanding correctly, metadata is handled by a DuckDB compatible SQL database and the actual data is handled by an open file format of your choice. You can perform familiar SQL queries and DDL, on highly scalable open format data files. Well done! #databs #dataengineering

Today we're launching DuckLake, an integrated data lake and catalog format powered by SQL. DuckLake unlocks next-generation data warehousing where compute is local, consistency central, and storage scales till infinity. ⁠ducklake is an open standard and we implemented it in the "ducklake" extension.

DuckLake announced today: https://ducklake.select/ An integrated data lake and catalog format "DuckLake delivers advanced data lake features without traditional lakehouse complexity by using Parquet files and your SQL database. It's an open, standalone format from the DuckDB team." Podcast […]

For more on why the answer for all of AI may be 42, check out @emilymbender.bsky.social and @alexhanna.bsky.social ‘s new book!

Research on #openscience in the Netherlands: Call for proposals https://www.openscience.nl/en/calls/research-on-open-science

Genoten bij S10 in Roosje vanavond

Post-quantum crypto finds its use in the real world! An informative article on the recent RHEL 10 release: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/post-quantum-cryptography-red-hat-enterprise-linux-10 #radboud University has a great track record in the research that led to this step, eg the recent PhD […]

Save the Web? Save the date! June 6, 2025, 10am CEST

Announcing our keynote speakers for #FAccT2025! 🎉 Suresh Venkatasubramanian (Brown) Nathalie Smuha (KU Leuven) Kristian Lum (Google DeepMind) Molly Crockett (Princeton) And the plenary panel will be on “Pathways of Change and the Future of Responsible AI"

Mircosoft's decision to block access to International Criminal Court Prosecutor Khan's mail - per Trump request - leads to fundamental questions: Could the Netherlands (and its public administration) survive without Microsoft? The answer is probably not... www.volkskrant.nl/binnenland/t...

In de achtertuin van de Faculteit der Natuurwetenschappen, Wiskunde en Informatica staat sinds een week een kampement van pro-Palestina-activisten. Het zorgt voor beroering binnen de faculteit, die allerlei veiligheidsmaatregelen heeft getroffen. (1/2) www.voxweb.nl/nieuws/pro-p...