It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 2024 Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific Region - the Second SIGIR-AP, hosted at Waseda University Nishiwaseda Campus, Tokyo, Japan, in December 2024. Following the great success of the very first SIGIR-AP held in Beijing in November 2023, we have worked very hard with our organising team over a year so that SIGIR-AP 2024 will live up to its high expectations.

As noted in the SIGIR-AP Charter and Bylaws, SIGIR-AP cares about sustainability, and is fully hybrid so that participants may choose to enjoy the conference online to avoid taking earth-unfriendly longdistance flights. Moreover, we are experimenting with a few novel approaches to running a sustainable conference, thanks to the generous support from the Tokyo Convention and Visitors Bureau: we will provide sustainable seafood lunch boxes, as well as a conference bag and a mug that are made from recycled plastic! In addition, a substantial portion of the banquet dishes will be vegetarian, which is known to be better for the environment than meat dishes (See Greta Thunberg: The Climate Book, p.249, Penguin Press, 2023).

The SIGIR-AP 2024 features two keynotes from Japan: one by Dr. Momoe Makino (Institute of Developing Economies Japan External Trade Organization), titled Information Experiment: What Does Empirical Microeconomics Tell Us? and the other by Professor Sadao Kurohashi (National Institute of Informatics) titled From Data Platforms to Knowledge Infrastructure. We thank Dr. Makino and Professor Kurohashi for boosting the brilliance of our conference program.