Report on the Workshop on Simulations for Information Access (Sim4IA 2024) at SIGIR 2024

This paper is a report of the Workshop on Simulations for Information Access (Sim4IA) workshop at SIGIR 2024. The workshop had two keynotes, a panel discussion, nine lightning talks, and two breakout sessions. Key takeaways were user simulation's importance in academia and industry, the possible bridging of online and offline evaluation, and the issues of organizing a companion shared task around user simulations for information access. We report on how we organized the workshop, provide a brief overview of what happened at the workshop, and summarize the main topics and findings of the workshop and future work.
Comment: Preprint of a SIGIR Forum submission for Vol. 58 No. 2 - December 2024