Natasha Noy gave a talk at CSAIL with the above title. She works in with a large medical bioinformatics group at Stanford. The bioinformatics community in general couldn’t care less about cool computer science but is one of the few groups that have heavily adopted formal ontologies as a way to get their work done. [...]
Peter Bailey et al. from Microsoft described a study comparing sources of context in predicting the subsequent interests of a user looking at a particular page. (A note of caution, the term context in the IR community refers to auxillary text or documents used to augment a query typically to help disambiguate it and improve [...]
Stefano Mazzochi used to work at our SIMILE project here at MIT, where we explored the use of RDF and Semantic Web tools for the sharing of knowledge. He has since gone to work at Metaweb and, it seems, become much more friendly to their “top down” approach of trying to create a centralized repository [...]
From our friends in Southhampton (correction: and Hasso-Platner), a study of how to differentiate experts (who really know how to tag stuff) from spammers (who want to tag their own stuff, but try to acquire credibility by copying tags others have used). They try to exploit the difference that the people who tag first are [...]
Xavier Amatriain of Telefonica research presented work on collaborative filtering. Usually you do collaborative filtering by finding the other users “similar” to your subject and combining their recommendations. This paper argued/demonstrated that sometimes you are better off figuring out who the experts art and only paying attention to their opinions. You might just create [...]
Robert Villa of U. Glasgow presented. They consider how broad complex tasks can be supported through a search interface, covering the multiple subtasks someone might need to perform—e.g., investigating several candidate resources in the middle of the search, or, doing multiple related searches. They developed an interface that let users create and [...]
Diane Kelley of UNC Chapel Hill presented some interfaces for helping users refine their queries. Lots of situations arise where people need to enter a series of queries to home in on what they are looking for. Literature shows people can exhaust their ideas for good search queries. IR has explored techniques [...]
I saw a nice poster from U. Glasgow which shows that different search engines exhibit different biases on which news media providers are returned as results for various queries. E.g., one search engine avoids New York Times, another avoids Reuters. They can’t tell whether these biases are intentional or side effects of ranking [...]
Computer scientist researchers are used to being ahead of the curve. Researchers gain access to new (expensive) hardware and software, and use it to push the limits of what is possible: better tools can enable better work. Eventually those tools come down in price, and the research can be disseminated. Think of what motion capture [...]
David Carmel from IBM Haifa spoke about the problem of labelling document clusters. The goal is to find short labels for the clusters that describe them well to end users. The typical approach seeks important terms in the clusters. But sometimes important terms aren’t helpful/meaningful, and sometimes the best labels don’t show up in the [...]