Inspiring keynote by Cecile Paris on lessons from the history in NLP and IR that can and should inform our future research, especially through learning from models of human-human communication (aka "user modelling"). And a really nice photo from Dagstuhl 1985, with KSJ #sigir2026

Ready for our tutorial at #SIGIR2026 Reasoning for IR & IR for Reasoning reasoning-for-ir.github.io John us in Eureka 2!

Our #SIGIR2026 Tutorial starting in Eureka 2! https://reasoning-for-ir.github.io/ Mohanna Hoveyda, Panagiotis Eustratiadis, Arjen P. de Vries, and Maarten de Rijke. 2026. Reasoning for IR & IR for Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR […] [Original post on idf.social]

After watching the soccer final in Melbourne with long time IR friends 🤗 Getting up at 4.30am, jet lag to the rescue! #sigir2026 #spain #argentina #final

This week in Melbourne, Informagus, the Information Retrieval research group from Radboud University, NL, participates actively in many parts of the ACM SIGIR and ICTIR 2026 conferences. Please come check out our contributions if you attend as well! #sigir2026 #ictir2026

This week I am in Melbourne, with this sunrise at my arrival, for #sigir2026 the ACM SIGIR 2026 conference! Looking forward to learning a lot and seeing many old friends!

What do you do your first day back in Oz?! Go and watch that 4K restoration of Strictly Ballroom in a movie theatre / museum downtown Melbourne, the ACMI, what else! It was as lovely a film as I remembered! (Baz Luhrmann is my fav director.) Here's some […] [Original post on idf.social]

The Trump administration is actively undermining European democracies. State Department has now launched grants (1-3 million $), designed to boost groups pushing MAGA style policies. Direct, blatant interference in sovereign nations. www.ft.com/content/e2ad...

"He was a mentor who was there because he cared about people and the research and not because he had something to gain. Thanks Frank for being just that!"

Interesting thread on students' learning behaviour (and failure) when they may resort to AI tools.

Datacenter Microsoft gebruikt 1 procent van alle Nederlandse stroom, Google wil geen inzage geven in verbruik www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2026/...

Why would any country reject an international court established to rule according to international law? The only explanation I can give is that such a country **does not value human rights**. That it puts its own peoples' merit and rights above the rights of others. The country that likes to […]

Small open models are getting genuinely good at document parsing: OvisOCR2 (0.9B, Apache 2.0) is claiming SOTA on OmniDocBench v1.6. Day-1 recipe: OCR a whole HF image dataset — digitised newspapers, archives, zines — to markdown with one command. huggingface.co/datasets/uv-scripts/ocr

Uitgever Sage heeft acht artikelen teruggetrokken van de ontslagen wetenschapper van de Radboud Universiteit die data manipuleerde. Yannick Griep was co-auteur van de artikelen in kwestie, die werden gepubliceerd in het wetenschappelijke tijdschrift waarvan hij hoofdredacteur was.

Highlights include Kevin Morby, Westside Cowboy, Naaz, Panic Shack, the XX, but it was so much fun, a list does no justice to the festival experience! If only to add David Byrne, El Nina, Matt Berninger, All them Witches, The Last Dinner Party, Folkbitch Trio, De Staat, CMAT, and all the DJs […]

Returned from a great weekend full of music and other entertainment at DTRH 2026, the picture is the view from the main stage looking out over the water, taken right after the Florence and the Machine show #dtrh2026

EFF and our allies are fighting back against proposal to replace neutral internet standards that encourage openness into restrictive requirements designed to monetize internet access. Help protect the rules that keep the web free and open. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Mastodon v4.6 introduced a new feature called "Collections" to enable people introduce others to the Fediverse, e.g. by theme. So here is the "Information Retrieval @ Fedi" collection. If you are active on Mastodon and want to be included, LMK, max 25 slots but we can always split by subtopic.

[Mastodon is the true European, independent, open standards-based and decentralised, social media solution! The greatest strength for democracy: No centralised entity that politicians could exercise control over.] RE: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/116766336607908530 With cool functions like […]

In other words, the judge does not really work as a comparison engine and decisions can be heavily influenced by model's internal beliefs. I have known this for a while, but my knowledge was anecdotal. I am happy to discover that Lee et al have confirmed this rigorously. arxiv.org/abs/2601.07506

🦆 There's only one week to go until DuckCon #7 in Amsterdam! We are all hyped to meet the flock and learn about the latest cool use cases from our community. As always, the event will feature the “State of the Duck” talk from DuckDB's co-creators.

The Untold Story About W Social: Unconventional Beginnings, Strategic Pitches and Conflicting Signals https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-untold-story-about-w-social-unconventional-beginnings-strategic-pitches-conflicting-signals/

6 juni 1944. #D-Day #Antifa

In the "you can't make this up" category of LLM interactions... TL;DR Google Gemini claims that LLMs "often give themselves a 95%+ confidence score even when they are hallucinating" - which was itself a "hallucinated" claim - then later assigns itself 0.95 confidence in that hallucinated claim. 🧵

Ode aan Lieke Marsman (zie link voor gift access NRC artikel)

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers

Ga naar de kroeg. Lach autoritaire types uit. Spreek elke dag een onbekende aan. Aai je geliefde. Durf te twijfelen. Dans en lach! Hij ging viral, de verzetscolumn. Nu geïllustreerd door de geweldige Floor Rieder en door De Bezige Bij uitgegeven als prent en poster! Te bestellen: marcialuyten.nl

Ik zal me verzetten @marcialuyten.bsky.social

A while back the DuckDB Labs team started a collaboration with LanceDB to bring you an extension that interacts with the Lance lakehouse format from DuckDB. In this post we take the extension for a test drive! duckdb.org/2026/05/21/t...

Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS Foundation motorolanews.com/motorola-thr...

AI executives "don’t seem to feel much pressure to win people over," @michellegoldberg.bsky.social writes. The fact that they don't feel constrained by public sentiment "shows how broken America’s democratic feedback loop has become.” www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/o...

EFF’s mission is sustained by people from every imaginable background giving modest donations. With your help, EFF is here to stay. Join EFF today. eff.org/spring

#duckcon7 will be in Amsterdam on Wednesday 24 June! #duckcon https://duckdb.org/events/2026/06/24/duckcon7/

Kabinet vindt met Markuszower, Taliban en Cthulhu werkbare meerderheid

You can now run SQL over 2.19 BILLION web pages — zero download. @commoncrawl.bsky.social April 2026 crawl + URL index are on Hugging Face Storage Buckets. DuckDB reads it straight over hf:// — I counted all 2.19B in ~35s. Or point your own agent at it 👇 huggingface.co/spaces/davan...

Add piracy and abduction to the list of crimes carried out by the Israelean government.

Rekenkamer: "als het Rijk zijn eigen doelstelling van 3% van het BBP voor research & development niet haalt, is dat een risico voor de innovatie en concurrentiekracht van Nederland. Het tekortschieten van resultaten kost Nederland vele miljarden euro’s per jaar." Weinig resultaat in 2025 […]

The Firewall vecht terug. Met het vrije woord en de rechtspraak. Word ook medestander van TheFirewall www. thefirewall.eu/doe-mee #VerzetJe

The phrase "stochastic parrot" coined by Emily Bender isn’t an argument. It’s a description or a metaphor, an attempt to make vivid what language mimicking machines do. Read the "frequently unasked questions" about 5 years of (ab-)use of stochastic parrots: medium.com/@emilymenonb...

Some reflections on frequently unasked questions about stochastic parrots (the phrase and the paper): medium.com/@emilymenonb...

If big tech and edtech firms are treating schools as public testbeds and trial sites for their AI technologies, then are they going to make the data available for independent analysis? Because there are real risks here of marking their own homework.

Anthropic is running a continuous research project inside real classrooms at scale and Google DeepMind is doing an RCT of an AI chatbot with 1500 UK schoolkids. Big tech is now all about evidencing AI effects through classroom experiments. The big question is... newsletters.qs.com/6a04954386e7...

Trump got called a declining nation to his face by a foreign autocrat he flew 20 hours to grovel before, and his response was to post a Biden blame thread. Staggering levels of humiliated delusion on full public display.

Op zoek naar effectieve middelen van verzet tegen de techgiganten ben ik zojuist medestander geworden van The Firewall. Om tegenwicht te bieden aan de macht van big tech. Om de democratie te stutten tegen de ondermijnende werking van de technologie zelf, maar vooral die van het geld, het gebrek […]

A Human-Centric Framework for Data Attribution in LLMs (FaCCT'26) TLDR: LLMs screwed up data economy, and NLP should help to re-design incentives with data attribution. Here's a moonshot for an alternative LLM use paradigm, for the users, creators & intermediaries. arxiv.org/abs/2602.10995 /1

Refusal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a cruel and unlawful betrayal of the European project and vision. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/07/eu-israel-refusal-to-suspend-the-eu-israel-association-agreement-is-a-cruel-and-unlawful-betrayal/

Annual Conference of the Search Engines and Society Networks #season2026 will be held at HAW Hamburg, Germany, 15th – 17th September 2026. https://searchenginesandsociety.net/season-2026/

President in de problemen, president zoekt schuldigen