ECIR 2026 will again have a Collab-a-thon that aims to foster new collaborations yielding new research projects and relationships with like-minded researchers. The Collab-a-thon was introduced at ECIR 2024 (see the SIGIR Forum Report for details) and continued in 2025.
In this year's iteration, at the end of each day, there will be a Collab-a-thon session on the topics discussed at the conference during the day. All ECIR 2026 attendees are welcome (and encouraged!) to join and participate in the Collab-a-thon, particularly PhD students and senior members from the community.
Schedule
The following topics will be discussed in each of the Collab-a-thon sessions.
Session 1 | Monday 16:00 – 17:00
- Core Retrieval Models, Representations & Evaluation
- Applied Generation, Evaluation & Analysis with LLMs
- IR-for-Good Paper I
- Specialized Retrieval Domains & Architectures
- Reproducibility I: Recommender Systems
- IR-for-Good Paper Session II
Session 2 | Tuesday 16:00 – 17:00
- LLMs as Rankers, Rerankers & Judges
- RAG: Retrieval Utility, Scaling & Infrastructure
- IR-for-Good Paper Session III
- Multimodal Retrieval & Embeddings
- Trustworthy and Responsible Retrieval-Augmented Systems
- Resource I: Interactive and Conversational Search
Session 3 | Wednesday 14:30 – 16:00
- IRRJ papers presentations
- CLEF tracks presentations
- Resource II: Domain- and Language-specific Datasets
- Infrastructure: identifying infrastructure and tooling that is important to the community or that potentially do not yet exist but could benefit the community.
- Evaluation: identifying test collections, evaluation methodologies, or new measures that are needed for new tasks identified by the community.
Collect Them All: Your Personal Collab-a-thon Sticker Book
To encourage participation and so that every participant can keep nice memories of the Collab-a-thon at ECIR 2026, you will receive a sticker book with information about the Collab-a-thon when you register for the conference. Every time you attend a Collab-a-thon session, you get session-specific stickers that you can collect and share. Collect them all to receive a rare, special sticker!
Join ecir2026-collabathon on the SIGIR Slack
Please join the ecir2026-collabathon channel in the SIGIR Slack to stay up-to-date and communicate with your peers.
The Collab-a-thon Report
All participants of the Collab-a-thon are invited to contribute as an author to the Collab-a-thon Report. This report aims to document the discussions and share them with the wider community. We'll help you out by taking notes on the discussions and writing up an initial draft.
Questions? Suggestions?
Please feel free to reach out in the SIGIR Slack or contact Maik Fröbe <maik.froebe@uni-jena.de> with any questions or feedback.