[LINK] Information Retrieval at Microsoft Research Labs, ANU, 18 April

[Tom Worthington]

Recommended: Nick Craswell is speaking on Challenges in Web 
Information Retrieval (Web IR) in Canberra on Wednesday (I visited 
Nick at Microsoft Research Labs Cambridge, on a bicycle tour of 
Europe <http://www.tomw.net.au/2004/europe/#cambridge>):

---
The Australian National University
DCS SEMINAR SERIES
<http://cecs.anu.edu.au/seminars/showone.pl?SID=425>

Challenges in Web Information Retrieval (Web IR)
Nick Craswell (Microsoft Research Labs, Cambridge, UK)

DATE: 2007-04-18 TIME: 16:00:00 - 17:00:00
LOCATION: CSIRO Seminar Room S206 (come to reception on Level 2, CS&IT Bldg)

ABSTRACT: When building a Web search engine, we can benefit from core 
IR techniques, such as probabilistic ranking models and evaluation 
methods. But we also face problems that are not yet so well-studied 
in the field of IR. This talk explores several of these. For 
efficiency reasons, we need to crawl the web selectively. This raises 
an interesting query-independent ranking problem. We have large-scale 
logs of user behavior. I will present a novel approach for dealing 
with sparsity of this data. We may also have relevance judgments for 
a large number of queries, as in the new TREC "million query" track, 
which allows for large-scale parameter tuning experiments. Each of 
these problems lends itself to data-driven solutions. The talk should 
thus give a favour of the work that goes on in the area of commercial Web IR.

BIO: Nick is a PhD graduate from ANU Computer Science who worked in 
CSIRO's Enterprise Search group before joining Microsoft Research in 
Cambridge. Nick is now employed as a researcher in the team behind 
Microsoft's Live.com search engine. He is a coordinator of the TREC 
Enterprise Track and the INEX Entities Track. He is also a Senior 
Reviewer for the ACM SIGIR Conference and is author of many 
influential and highly cited papers in the Information Retrieval area.

---


Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml