The Noisy Channel

The moment I learned that CIKM 2012 would be held in Maui, I knew I had to be there. Having co-organized the CIKM 2011 industry event, I had enough karma to be invited as part of this year’s industry event, representing LinkedIn. PRE-CONFERENCE: PSEUNAMI WARNING AND A WORKSHOP I arrived in Maui on Sunday, October [...]

[Read more →]

Last year, I had the pleasure of co-organizing the CIKM 2011 Industry Event in Glasgow. This year, I’m honored to be part of the CIKM 2012 Industry Event program, along with top industry researchers from Adobe, eBay, Google, Groupon, IBM, Microsoft, Tencent, and Walmart Labs. I’ll be giving a talk on “Data By The People, [...]

[Read more →]

Human-computer information retrieval (HCIR) is the study of information retrieval techniques that integrate human intelligence and algorithmic search to help people explore, understand, and use information. Since 2007, the HCIR Symposium (previously known as the HCIR Workshop) has provided a venue for the theoretical and practical study of HCIR. We even inspired an EuroHCIR workshop across the [...]

[Read more →]

Sharing knowledge is part of our core culture at LinkedIn, whether it’s through hackdays or contributions to open-source projects. We actively participate in academic conferences, such as KDD, SIGIR, RecSys, and CIKM, as well as industry conferences like QCON and Strata. Beyond sharing our own knowledge, we provide a platform for researchers and practitioners to share their insights with the technical community. We [...]

[Read more →]

At SIGIR 2004, Ellen Voorhees presented a paper entitled “Measuring Ineffectiveness” in which she asserted: Using average values of traditional evaluation measures [for information retrieval systems] is not an appropriate methodology because it emphasizes effective topics: poorly performing topics’ scores are by definition small, and they are therefore difficult to distinguish from the noise inherent [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

Last night, I had the pleasure to deliver the keynote address at the CIO Summit US. It was an honor to address an assembly of CIOs, CTOs, and technology executives from the nation’s top organizations. My theme was “Science as a Strategy”. To set the stage, I told the story of TunkRank: how, back in [...]

[Read more →]

I’ll be participating in the Data 2.0 Summit on Tuesday, April 3rd, and I hope to see some of you there. Last year, my colleague (and fellow LinkedIn data scientist) Scott Nicholson attended and wrote this guest post about it. This year, I’m not only attending but participating on a panel about social data, moderated by AllthingsD Senior [...]

[Read more →]

I spent the last three days at the O’Reilly Strata Conference, an assembly of two thousand over 2500 people focused on data science and its applications. While I’m wary of industry conferences from attending vendor-fests in my past life in the enterprise software world, Strata is an exceptionally good conference. The speakers were a who’s who of data [...]

[Read more →]