Search Solutions 2026: Call for Tutorials

Search Solutions (SS) is the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group’s annual event focused on practitioner issues in the arena of search and information retrieval. Search Solutions consists of two parts: a tutorial day and a conference day.

We invite tutorial proposals which focus on any area of the practical application of search technologies to real-world problems, for the tutorial day due to take place on Tuesday 24 November 2026, before the conference day on Wednesday 25 November 2026.

Tutorials in previous years have included: designing usability for search, multimedia information retrieval, evaluation, pattern search, city search in SmartCities, text analysis, introduction to natural language processing and introduction to reinforcement learning, Apache Solr and open-source technologies, Legal IR, RAG and LLM, etc.

The details of the previous SS and SS tutorials can be found here

Tutorials

Proposals for both full day (5-6 hours including breaks and lunch) and half day (2-3 hours including breaks) tutorials are invited.  The tutorials will take place on Tuesday 24 November 2026 at the BCS offices in London in person.

Proposal submission

Tutorial proposals should be submitted in an email to the tutorial chair, Haiming Liu, at h.liu@soton.ac.uk by AOE  Friday 10th July 2026, using the following template:

• Name of presenter(s): please list the names and affiliations of presenter(s).
• Contact details: email address, phone numbers, etc. 
• Title: title of the tutorial. 
• Type of tutorial: half-day or full-day.
• Tutorial Abstract: for publicity.
• Delivery format: In person only or Hybrid.
• Target audience: please outline the practitioner audience to be addressed.
• Learning outcomes: what would the practitioners gain from attending this tutorial?
• Tutorial schedule and description: provide a draft schedule and detailed description of each of the items.
• Tutorial logistics/materials: required media and formats for tutorial. What will be provided to attendees (e.g. slides).
• Bio of presenter(s): including track record of presenting tutorials, lecturing experience, etc. (Max. 200 words)

Selection procedure

All tutorial proposals will be reviewed by the Tutorial Chair and approved by the Organising Committee. Selection will be based on the quality of the content and its relevance to the main theme of Search Solutions. Notifications will be sent on Friday 31 July 2026.

Tutorial Chair

Dr Haiming Liu, h.liu@soton.ac.uk