This week, a new academic year starts. This week also marks an important step in the development of ILPS as a team. Over the past fifteen or so years, ILPS has grown steadily. Our growth has continued during the past academic year, despite the unusual conditions. New students have joined, new postdocs, new members of staff. And we have helped to start new academic-industrial labs. We have now reached a size where it makes sense to split the team in two, to make sure that we all maintain enough of a shared language and focus, that communication stays effective, and that our management overhead is kept to an absolute minimum. 

We are very proud to announce two important developments starting today, September 1, 2020. First, Christof Monz, who joined ILPS in 2009, will start and lead a new team, the Language Technology Lab, that will focus on, indeed, language technology. Second, Evangelos Kanoulas will take over the leadership role at ILPS. Maarten de Rijke will focus on his role as university professor and as scientific director of ICAI. These changes position us well for the future and help prepare the Informatics Institute for future growth in two key areas, information retrieval and language technology. 

To mark these significant changes, ILPS will change its name to IRLab, The Information Retrieval Lab at the University of Amsterdam.