As we approach 50 years of SIGIR conferences in 2027, it is an opportune moment not only to celebrate the impact of Information Retrieval (IR) research, but also to invest in shaping the next generation of ideas, systems, and communities that will define the field's future. SIGIR Futures is a new ACM SIGIR program designed to help shape the trajectory of IR research and practice by supporting high-ambition, future-oriented events and grassroots projects proposed and run by community members. SIG support for Futures activities may include financial assistance, mentorship from research leaders, connections within and beyond our community, and publicity for an activity. Potential activities include workshops, challenges and competitions, visionary whitepapers, and other community-driven efforts. Futures will begin with a fixed-deadline Call for Proposals (CFP). Selected activities will take place in 2027, aligning with the 50th anniversary of the SIGIR conference and helping shape the next 50 years of IR. In this inaugural year for Futures, we will prioritize fewer, higher-impact activities. After SIGIR 2027, we will shift to a standing CFP, enabling Futures to continuously surface and support emerging directions in IR.
The First Workshop on INformation access in Uncertainty ScEnarios (INFUSE) [Rieger et al., 2026], in conjunction with the Forty-eighth European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) 2026, focused on the complexities people face when seeking information on issues that lack a clear, definitive answer. These situations, defined as "uncertainty scenarios", often involve scarce information, such as data voids, rapidly evolving knowledge, such as breaking news or rumours, or debated topics with multiple conflicting perspectives. A core problem is that modern information retrieval (IR) systems and large language models (LLMs) are primarily optimised to produce answers rather than communicate the limits of existing knowledge. Consequently, these systems may generate plausible-sounding responses even when reliable information is missing, thereby obscuring rather than exposing uncertainty. This dynamic introduces significant risks, including fostering a false sense of certainty, amplifying mis- and disinformation, and exposing users to viewpoint bias. To address these challenges, this full-day, in-person event brought together a cross-disciplinary group of researchers and practitioners. The primary objectives of the workshop included: • Highlighting emerging risks: Drawing attention to the potential harms caused by the rapid integration of LLM-enabled search services. • Building community: Connecting professionals and researchers from various backgrounds who are focused on information access under uncertainty. • Improving information systems: Contributing to the creation of systems that promote critical thinking, awareness of complex nuances, and an informed citizenry. • Fostering collaboration: Creating a dedicated space for attendees to discover shared interests and form impactful research partnerships. The INFUSE workshop was designed to be highly interactive, moving away from one-sided presentations. The program featured invited talks from interdisciplinary experts, participant presentations grouped by topic, "musical" roundtables for discussions, and a collaboration fair to help participants launch new research projects. The discussions and outcomes are compiled here as a collaborative report. Our aim is to share these insights with the broader IR community and help seed further dialogue on uncertainty in information access. Date: 2 April 2026. Website: https://sites.google.com/view/infuse-workshop/.
We report on the outcomes of the first BREV-RAG (Beyond Relevance-based EValuation of RAG systems) workshop, a half-day post-conference workshop of ACM SIGIR-AP 2025. The workshop featured five paper presentations and breakout group discussions. After the paper presentations, three evaluation axes/themes were chosen by the workshop participants and accordingly three discussion groups were formed, namely, modesty, diversity and fairness , and specialised domains groups. We report on what each of the groups discussed during and after the workshop. Date: 10 December 2025. Website: http://sakailab.com/brev-rag/.
Reproducibility efforts should yield easy-to-use, well-packaged, and self-contained software artifacts. However, the goal is to enable AI agents, not fellow human users, to reproduce empirical results. Gone are the days where a user engages with code and documentation directly. Increasingly, this task is delegated to agents, and even in cases where user intervention is required, interactions are mediated by agents. Given this shift in the target audience, developers building software artifacts in support of reproducibility need to optimize for the "agent experience" alongside the "developer experience". In modern parlance, this means making software legible to agents. This paper explores the implications of this shift in mindset and attempts to explain what's changed and how we should adapt. Generalizing on my own recent attempts to "agentify" the Anserini IR research toolkit, I share lessons learned that hopefully illustrate this shift in emphasis with current agentic technology.
The Ninth International Workshop on Narrative Extraction from Texts (Text2Story'26) was held on March 29th, 2026, in conjunction with the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026) in Delft, The Netherlands. During this full-day event, attendees engaged in discussions and presentations focused on recent advancements in narrative representation, extraction, generation, and evaluation, with particular emphasis on the growing convergence of Information Retrieval with Transformers, Large Language Models (LLMs), and agentic AI. The workshop featured two keynote addresses and a mix of oral presentations and a poster session covering fourteen accepted papers. The workshop proceedings are available online 1 . Date: 29 March 2026. Website: https://text2story26.inesctec.pt/.
