Even as home computers are being equipped with hard drives more massive than most users need, the scientific community is facing challenges of inadequate data storage systems. Experiments conducted in research facilities can produce unimaginable amounts of information, and computer scientists are working on ways to handle and manage it. Virtually every modern computer system incorporates...

The Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) is an annual event that supports "research within the information retrieval community by providing the infrastructure necessary for large-scale evaluation of text retrieval methodologies." Proceedings of the conference covering all twelve years of its history are available on the TREC homepage. As TREC has evolved, it has added several focus areas that span new...

The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, located within the computer science department at the University of Massachusetts, is dedicated to "developing tools that provide effective and efficient access to large, heterogeneous, distributed, text and multimedia databases." To this end, the Center conducts a number of research activities, along with some rather compelling demonstration...