July 2012 – The Noisy Channel

Long-time readers know that I have strong opinions about academic conferences. I find the main value of conferences and workshops to be facilitating face-to-face interaction among researchers and practitioners who share professional interests. An offline version of LinkedIn, if you will.

This year, I’m focusing my attention on three conferences: RecSys, HCIR, and CIKM. Regrettably I won’t be able to attend SIGIR, Strata NY, or UIST. But fortunately my colleagues are attending the first two, and hopefully some UIST attendees will be able to arrive a few days early and attend HCIR. Perhaps we can steal a page from WSDM and CSCW and arrange a cross-conference social in Cambridge.

6th ACM Recommender System Conference (RecSys 2012)

At RecSys, which will take place September 9-13 in Dublin,I’m co-organizing the Industry Track with Yehuda Koren. The program features technology leaders from Facebook, Microsoft, StumbleUpon, The Echo Nest, Yahoo, and of course LinkedIn. I’m also delivering a keynote at the Workshop on Recommender Systems and the Social Web. I hope to see you there, along with several of my colleagues who will be presenting their work on recommender systems at LinkedIn.

6th Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR 2012)

The 6th HCIR represents a milestone — we’ve upgraded from a 1-day worksop to a 2-day symposium. We are continuing two great traditions: strong keynotes (Marti Hearst) and the HCIR Challenge (focused on people search). The symposium will take place October 4-5 in Cambridge, MA. Hope to see many of you there. And, if you’re still working on your submissions and challenge entries, good luck wrapping them up by the July 29 deadline!

21st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2012)

Finally, you can’t miss CIKM in Hawaii! This year’s conference will take place October 29 – November 2 in Maui. After co-organizing last year’s industry track in Glasgow, I’m delighted to be a speaker in this year’s track, which also includes researchers and practitioners from Adobe, eBay, Google, Groupon, IBM, Microsoft, Tencent, Walmart Labs, and Yahoo. A great program in one of the world’s most beautiful settings, how can you resist?

I hope to see many of you at one — hopefully all! — of these great events! But, if you can’t make it, be reassured that I’ll blog about them here.

As we get ready for the Sixth Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval this October in Cambridge, MA, people around the world are working on their entries for the third HCIR Challenge.

Our first HCIR Challenge in 2010 focused on exploratory search of a news archive. Thanks to the generosity of the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), we were able to provide participants with access to the New York Times (NYT) Annotated Corpus free of charge. Six teams presented their entries:

Search for Journalists: New York Times Challenge Report
Corrado Boscarino, Arjen P. de Vries, and Wouter Alink (Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica)

Exploring the New York Times Corpus with NewsClub
Christian Kohlschütter (Leibniz Universität Hannover)

Searching Through Time in the New York Times (WINNER)
Michael Matthews, Pancho Tolchinsky, Roi Blanco, Jordi Atserias, Peter Mika, and Hugo Zaragoza (Yahoo! Labs)
(covered in Technology Review: “A Search Service that Can Peer into the Future“)

News Sync: Three Reasons to Visualize News Better
V.G. Vinod Vydiswaran (University of Illinois), Jeroen van den Eijkhof (University of Washington), Raman Chandrasekar (Microsoft Research), Ann Paradiso (Microsoft Research), and Jim St. George (Microsoft Research)

Custom Dimensions for Text Corpus Navigation
Vladimir Zelevinsky (Endeca Technologies)

A Retrieval System Based on Sentiment Analysis
Wei Zheng and Hui Fang (University of Delaware)

In 2011, we continued wth a Challenge focused on the problem of information availability. Four teams presented their systems to address this particularly difficult area of information retrieval:

FreeSearch – Literature Search in a Natural Way
Claudiu S. Firan, Wolfgang Nejdl, Mihai Georgescu (University of Hanover), and Xinyun Sun (DEKE Lab MOE, Renmin)

Session-based search with Querium (WINNER)
Gene Golovchinsky (FX Palo Alto Lab) and Abdigani Diriye (University College London)

GisterPro
David L.Ostby and Edmond Brian (Visual Purple)

Query Analytics Workbench
Antony Scerri, Matthew Corkum, Keith Gutfreund, Ron Daniel Jr., Michael Taylor (Elsevier Labs)

This year’s Challenge focuses on people search — that is, on the problem of people and expertise finding.

Here are examples of the kinds of tasks we will publish after the systems are frozen at the end of August:

Hiring
Given a job description, produce a set of suitable candidates for the position. An example of a job description: http://www.linkedin.com/jobs?viewJob=&jobId=3004979.
Assembling a Conference Program
Given a conference’s past history, produce a set of suitable candidates for keynotes, program committee members, etc. for the conference. An example conference could be HCIR 2013, where past conferences are described at http://hcir.info/.
Finding People to deliver Patent Research or Expert Testimony
Given a patent, produce a set of suitable candidates who could deliver relevant research or expert testimony for use in a trial. These people can be further segmented, e.g., students and other practitioners might be good at the research, while more senior experts might be more credible in high-stakes litigation. An example task would be to find people for http://www.articleonepartners.com/study/index/1658-system-and-method-for-providing-consumer-rewards.

For all of the tasks there is a dual goal of obtaining a set of candidates (ideally organized or ranked) and producing a repeatable and extensible search strategy.

Best of luck to this year’s HCIR Challenge participants — I’m excited to see the systems that they present this October at the Symposium!