Back from ECIR 2026 in Delft

I have just returned from ECIR 2026, held in Delft, The Netherlands, from 29 March to 2 April 2026.

This year, I had the great pleasure of serving as a Short Paper Chair alongside Sean MacAvaney and Mohammad Aliannejadi. The short paper track received 108 submissions, of which 37 were accepted (≈34% acceptance rate). I am really happy how soothly our team handled the process.

A fun editorial milestone: The conference proceedings were published in four parts—which means, we now have 4 DOIs as co-editors :-). (All short papers appear in Volume II, though.)

I also had the pleasure to serve as a mentor at the ECIR 2026 Doctoral Consortium, working with two excellent PhD students.

The main conference took place in Lijm & Cultuur—a memorable and refreshingly unusual venue compared to the standard conference venues. Delft was nice, too: while it welcomed me with very Dutch rain, it rewarded us with steadily improving weather over the days.