[LINK] Yahoo Web Researcher in Canberra

[Tom Worthington]

Professor Ricardo Baeza-Yates, VP of Yahoo! Research, will speak on "The 
web: Wisdom of crowds and a long tail", 2pm, 5 September 2012, in the 
famous Room N101, CSIT Building, Australian National University, Canberra:

---
The web: Wisdom of crowds and a long tail

The Web continues to grow and evolve very fast, changing our daily lives.

     This activity represents the collaborative work of the millions of 
institutions and people that contribute content to the Web as well as 
more than one billion people that use it. In this ocean of hyperlinked 
data there is explicit and implicit information and knowledge. But how 
is the Web? Web data mining is the main task to answer this question.

     Web data comes in three main flavors: content (text, images, etc.), 
structure (hyperlinks) and usage (navigation, queries, etc.), implying 
different techniques such as text, grap other publications, or log 
mining. Each case reflects the wisdom of some group of people that can 
be used to make the Web better. For example, user generated tags in Web 
2.0 sites. One important phenomenon of this wisdom is the long tail of 
the special interests of people.

     In this talk we cover all these concepts and give specific examples.

     Ricardo Baeza-Yates is VP of Yahoo! Research for Europe, Middle 
East and Latin America, leading the labs at Barcelona, Spain and 
Santiago, Chile, as well as supervising the newer lab in Haifa, Israel. 
Until 2005 he was the director of the Center for Web Research at the 
Department of Computer Science of the Engineering School of the 
University of Chile; and ICREA Professor at the Department of Technology 
of the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.

     He is co-author of the best-seller book Modern Information 
Retrieval, published in 1999 by Addison-Wesley with a second edition in 
2011, as well as co-author of the 2nd edition of the Handbook of 
Algorithms and Data Structures in Pascal and C, Addison-Wesley, 1991; 
and co-editor of Information Retrieval: Data Structures and Algorithms, 
Prentice-Hall, 1992, among more than 200 other publications.

     He has received the Organization of American States award for young 
researchers in exact sciences (1993) and several national awards in 
Chile. In 2003 he was the first computer scientist to be elected to the 
Chilean Academy of Sciences. During 2007 he was awarded the Graham Medal 
for innovation in computing, given by the University of Waterloo to 
distinguished ex-alumni. In 2009 he was awarded the Latin American 
distinction for contributions to CS in the region and became an ACM 
Fellow, followed in 2011 by an IEEE Fellowship.
---

More at: 
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/08/yahoo-researcher-speaking-in-canberra.html


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards
Legislation

Adjunct Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/