Report on the Collab-a-Thon at ECIR 2024

Sean MacAvaney, Adam Roegiest, Aldo Lipani, Andrew Parry, Björn Engelmann, Christin Katharina Kreutz, Chuan Meng, Erlend Frayling, Eugene Yang, Ferdinand Schlatt, Guglielmo Faggioli, Harrisen Scells, Iana Atanassova, Jana Friese, Janek Bevendorff, Javier Sanz-Cruzado, Johanne Trippas, Kanaad Pathak, Kaustubh D. Dhole, Leif Azzopardi et al. (10 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: We present a report on the Collab-a-thon, a series of sessions at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) 2024 designed to help foster new collaborations during a conference. This report presents the motivation and design of the Collab-a-thon, a summary of the discussions covered at each session, and a set of recommendations for conducting similar events in the future. The event is set to run again at ECIR 2025 and planning is underway to pilot the event in a different community at the IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS) 2025.Date: 25--27 March 2024.Website: https://www.ecir2024.org/collab-a-thon/.