Back from Tokyo

SIGIR 2017, the 40th annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval was a fantastic (and flawlessly run) event. I was particularly delighted to receive a Test of Time award from SIGIR president Diane Kelly for the 1994 paper in which the late statistician Bill Gale and I introduced the uncertainty sampling algorithm. Neither of us could have imagined at the time that this active learning algorithm and its descendants would end up being central in predictive coding for e-discovery, a field in its infancy at the time!