We’re excited to announce the AI & Open Government Workshop (AIOG), co-located with ICAIL 2026 in Singapore on June 8, 2026. The call for papers is now open! Together with Graham McDonald (University ...

SCOOP: A hacktivist has scraped more than half a million payment records from a company that makes consumer-grade spyware and other phone tracking apps, exposing customers' email addresses and partial card payment numbers. TechCrunch verified the scraped data is authentic. By @[email protected] and me: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/09/hacktivist-scrapes-over-500000-stalkerware-customers-payment-records

by Gijs Hendriksen, Djoerd Hiemstra, and Arjen P. de Vries We propose to redesign the access to Web-scale indexes. Instead of using custom search engine software and hiding access behind an API or a user interface, we store the inverted file in a standard, open source file format (Parquet) on publicly accessible (and cheap) object storage. Users can perform retrieval by fetching the relevant postings for the query terms and performing ranking locally. By using standard data formats and cloud infrastructure, we (a) natively support a wide range of downstream clients, and (b) can directly benefit from improvements in analytical query processing engines. We show the viability of our approach through a series of experiments using the ClueWeb corpora. While our approach (naturally) has a higher latency than dedicated search APIs, we show that we can still obtain results in reasonable time (usually within 10-20 seconds). Therefore, we argue that the increased accessibility and decreased deployment costs make this a suitable setup for cooperation in IR research by sharing large indexes publicly. _To be presented at the 48th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2026) on 30 March to 1 April 2026 in Delft, The Netherlands_. [download pdf]