It is our great pleasure to welcome you to New Brunswick, New Jersey and the third ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2018). CHIIR, as you may know, has roots in two previously successful communities: The Information Interaction in Context (IIiX) conference and the Human Computer Information Retrieval (HCIR) symposium, which ran from 2006 and 2007 respectively. These meetings were focused on issues that involved Human Information Behavior (HIB), Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Those roots, as well as decades of research and development on information seeking and other forms of information interaction, human-centered design, and information retrieval are the backbone of CHIIR. At the same time, this vibrant new community has picked up more scholars and themes as it continues to attract new students and professionals, as well as emerging research topics that are evident in this year's program. In fact, CHIIR is one of the few forums that explicitly supports presentation of bold new ideas through its Perspective Papers category. In addition, we have picked up Demos as a new category for presentations this year.
All of these wonderful things could not be possible without a large number of people making significant contributions. We are quite fortunate to have Katriina Bystroouml;ouml;m, Falk Scholer, and Jeff Huang as our Program Chairs this year. These three brave souls took upon a tremendous effort of working with dozens of submissions, reviewers, and meta-reviewers and constructing a high-quality program while coordinating from three different continents. Soo Young Rieh and Preben Hansen, on the other hand dealt with higher than expected load for short papers and still managed to get them reviewed and assessed on time. Even our Doctoral Consortium (DC) this year ended up being quite challenging as we received twice as many submissions as before, but our fine DC chairs Jaceck Gwizdka and Vivek Singh found world-class mentors for these doctoral students. Thanks to our Workshops and Tutorials Chair Xiaojun Yuan, we have a fantastic lineup of tutorials on the first day and workshops on the last day. When the whole program was ready for the conference, it was our Proceedings Chair Roberto Gonzalez-Ibanez who managed to put together these proceedings that you are holding in your hands, or more likely viewing in the ACM Digital Library! We are thankful for having an energetic and resourceful local arrangement committee with Michael Cole as the Treasurer, Fernando Diaz as the Sponsorship Chair, Kaitlin Costello as the Local Organizing Chair, and Sunyoung Kim and Matt Mitsui as the Student Volunteers Chairs. And it was our Publicity Chair Anita Crescenzi, who helped us with not only the outreach efforts, but also with the registration system. Finally, none of these would have happened without the authors and reviewers from more than 30 countries whose contributions are reflected in every aspect of this conference. So, thank you all!
