While the SIGIR 2010 Industry Track keynotes had the highest-profile speakers, the rest of the day assembled an impressive line-up: The new frontiers of Web search: going beyond the 10 blue links Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Andrei Broder, Yoelle Maarek, and Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo! Labs Cross-Language Information Retrieval in the Legal Domain Samir Abdou and Thomas Arni, [...]

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When I organized the SIGIR 2009 Industry Track last year, my goal was to meet the standard set by the CIKM 2008 Industry Event: a compelling set of presentations that would give researchers an opportunity to learn about the problems most relevant to industry practitioners, and offer practitioners an opportunity to deepen their understanding of the [...]

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On the second day of the SIGIR 2010 conference, I did start shuttling between sessions to attend particular talks. In the morning session, I attended three talks. The first, “Geometric Representations for Multiple Documents” by Jangwon Seo and Bruce Croft, looks at the problem of representing combinations of documents in a query model. It provides [...]

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The second day of the SIGIR 2010 conference kicked off with a keynote by TREC pioneer Donna Harman entitled “Is the Cranfield Paradigm Outdated?”. If you are at all familiar with Donna’s work on TREC, you’ll hardly be surprised that her answer was a resounding “NO!”. But of course she did a lot more than [...]

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The first day of SIGIR 2010 ended with a monster poster session–over 100 posters to see in 2 hours in a hall without air conditioning! I managed to see a handful: “Query Quality: User Ratings and System Predictions” by Claudia Hauff, Franciska de Jong, Diane Kelly, and Leif Azzopardi offered the startling (to me at [...]

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I’ve always felt that parallel conference sessions are designed to optimize for anticipated regret, and SIGIR 2010 is no exception. I decided that I’d try to attend whole sessions rather than shuttle between them. I started by attending the descriptively titled “Applications I” session. Jinyoung Kim of UMass presented joint work with Bruce Croft on [...]

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As promised, here are some highlights of the SIGIR 2010 conference thus far. Also check out the tweet stream with hash tag #sigir2010. I arrived here on Monday, too jet-lagged to even imagine attending the tutorials, but fortunately I recovered enough to go to the welcome reception in the Parc de Bastions that evening. Then [...]

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I’m flying to Geneva tonight to attend SIGIR. Hope to see some of you there! I’ll be back in a week and will post highlights and personal reactions.

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I gave this presentation today at AT&T Labs, hosted by Stephen North of Graphviz fame. The talk was recorded, but I don’t know when the video will be available. In the mean time, here are the slides. The audience was very engaged and questioned just about all of the TunkRank model’s assumptions. I’m hopeful that as [...]

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Several people have asked me recently for advice on how to recruit for their tech startups. I’ve responded by digging out the following email that someone emailed me last year. I reproduce it in full here, minus the company name: Subject: we just got Beatles Rock Band for the office and are looking for a [...]

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