HCIR 2012: the sixth international symposium on human-computer interaction and information retrieval

This report describes the 2012 Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval. Now in its sixth year, the two-day symposium (formerly a one-day workshop) was held in October in Cambridge, MA. The event brought together researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government and a range of disciplines for in-depth discussions in an informal atmosphere. The symposium attracted 75 attendees, over a third of which were from industry. New for this year, we accepted full papers that will be archived and published in the ACM Digital Library. We continued the HCIR Challenge, this year focusing on the problem of people and expertise finding, five in-depth system demonstrations, and audience selection of a challenge winner.