SIGIR 2024

Governments have been waking up to AI, and have increasingly recognized the importance of related disciplines such as Information Retrieval (IR), as we can see by the US's Executive Order on Artificial Intelligence and the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act. The astounding advances in AI capabilities over the past few years have driven a surge of interest in the public sector. How can AI be used for the public good? How can IR help in the process? How should governments relate to AI technology and companies? When governments, politicians, and public interest groups look at making AI and IR part of their process, and how should that best be done?

SIGIR 2024's Government Day aims to highlight how governments utilize AI to benefit the public and provide new services that enhance people's quality of life. The IR community is uniquely positioned to support the public sector by developing AI tools that deliver precise and grounded results. For decision-makers who shape public policies and societal impacts, IR has been and will continue to play a critical role.

We have invited a number of speakers who will address the government role in AI safety, the ways in which IR and AI technologies are used by government agencies to offer public services and respond to citizens, the government’s vision for funding AI research, and more.

Registration for attendees is open for all interested in this topic.

Time and Location

Date: Wednesday, July 17, 2024
Room: Presidential Ballroom

Schedule

Time	Event	Speaker
09:00 - 10:00	Plenary Keynote	Michael Littman University Professor of Computer Science, Brown University; Director, Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (CISE/IIS), National Science Foundation
10:00 - 10:30	Coffee Break
10:30 - 11:30	Keynote: Petabyte-scale Information Retrieval	Kim Pruitt, Director National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Library of Medicine, NIH
11:30 - 12:30	Keynote	Elham Tabassi Senior Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Associate Director for Emerging Technologies in the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL). Head of Trustworthy and Responsible AI at NIST.
12:30 - 13:30	Lunch Break
14:00 - 15:00	Afternoon 1 - Panel: Access to Public Records	Moderator: Jason R. Baron Professor of the Practice, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland Panelists: Adam A. Marshall Senior Staff Attorney, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Jill Reilly Digital Engagement Director, Office of Innovation, National Archives and Records Administration Gulam Shakir Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Officer, National Archives and Records Administration Summary: Given that the federal government is under a mandate to transition to electronic recordkeeping by June 2024, the use of AI methods to assist the public in facilitating searches of government records has never been of more critical importance. AI methods also bring a set of new challenges and new issues, both with respect to web-based archival collections, as well as regarding a vast number of records that are accessible only through the Freedom of Information Act or other legal process. Among the emerging issues to be explored: algorithmic bias reflective of latent bias in the archival labeling of descriptive data; crowdsourcing for smarter AI; AI/ML tools for efficient filtering of sensitivities in record collections, including due to the presence of PII and other exempt information from disclosure; the challenge of providing satisfactory explanations of algorithmic “black box” processes that may be subject to judicial process; and the use of gen AI for interactions with the public.
15:00 - 15:30	Fostering University-Society Collaborations	Maarten de Rijke Distinguished University Professor, University of Amsterdam, and Co-founder and Director, Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence
15:30 - 16:00	Can Research Paths Be Foreseen? Mapping 50 Years of AI Journey	Qiaozhu Mei Associate Dean for Research and Innovation, School of Information, University of Michigan
16:00 - 16:30	Coffee break
16:30 - 17:30	Afternoon 2 - Speaker	Mike Godwin Policy and Privacy Lead/Advisor, Anonym, and former counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation