The Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) was formed in
the Computer Science Department ofthe University ofMassachusetts,
Amherst in 1992. The core support for the Center came from a National
Science Foun- tion State/Industry/University Cooperative Research
Center(S/IUCRC) grant, although there had been a sizeable information
retrieval (IR) research group for over 10 years prior to that grant.
Thebasic goal ofthese Centers is to combine basic research, applied
research, and technology transfer. The CIIR has been successful in each
of these areas, in that it has produced over 270 research papers, has
been involved in many successful government and industry collaborations,
and has had a significant role in high-visibility Internet sites and
start-ups. As a result of these efforts, the CIIR has become known
internationally as one of the leading research groups in the area of
information retrieval. The CIIR focuses on research that results in more
effective and efficient access and discovery in large, heterogeneous,
distributed, text and multimedia databases. The scope of the work that
is done in the CIIR is broad and goes significantly beyond "traditional"
areas of information retrieval such as retrieval models, cross-lingual
search, and automatic query expansion. The research includes both
low-level systems issues such as the design of protocols and
architectures for distributed search, as well as more human-centered
topics such as user interface design, visualization and data mining with
text, and multimedia retrieval.