Tonight I’m taking a red-eye to Pittsburgh so that I can spend three days at my (doctoral) alma mater, CMU. In addition to spending time with lots of great students and faculty, my goal is to communicate a taste of the hard computer science problems we are solving (or trying to solve!) at LinkedIn. I’m giving a tech talk Tuesday afternoon, joining my colleagues for an info session Tuesday evening, and participating in the Technical Opportunities Conference (TOC) Wednesday.
Here’s a teaser for my tech talk:
You can find more details about LinkedIn’s visits to CMU and other campuses at http://studentcareers.linkedin.com/.
Hopefully some of you are attending the O’Reilly Strata Conference in New York this Thursday and Friday. If so, I encourage you to attend my panel session on “Entities, Relationships, and Semantics: the State of Structured Search“:
Structured search improves the search experience through the identification of entities and their relationships in documents and queries. This panel will explore the current state of structured and semi-structured search, as well as exploring the open problems in an area that promises to revolutionize information seeking.
The four panelists work on some of the world’s largest structured search problems, from offering users structured search on Google’s web corpus to building a computing system that defeated Jeopardy! champions in an extreme test of natural language understanding. They work on the data, tools, and research that are driving this field. They are all excellent researchers and presenters, promising to offer a informative and engaging panel discussion, for which I will act as moderator.
Panelists:
- Andrew Hogue is a Senior Staff Engineer and Engineering Manager in the Search Quality group at Google New York. He has worked on a wide array of projects including question answering, Google Squared, sentiment analysis, local and product search, and Google Goggles. His is interested in the areas of structured data, information extraction, and machine learning, and their applications to search and search interfaces. Prior to Google, he earned a M.Eng. and B.S. in Computer Science from MIT.
- Breck Baldwin is the President of Alias-i, creators of the popular LingPipe computational linguistics toolkit. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1995 from the University of Pennsylvania. In the time between his thesis on coreference resolution and evaluation and founding Alias-i in 1999, Breck worked on DARPA-funded projects through the University of Pennsylvania.
- Evan Sandhaus works as the Semantic Technologist in The New York Times Research and Development Labs. He is spearheading The New York Times Linked Open Data Strategy and overseeing the release of 1.8 million documents to the computer science research community. Previously, Evan helped to put The New York Times on Google Earth, collaborated with New York University to explore new directions in News Search, and worked to bring The New York Times to Facebook.
- Wlodek Zadrozny is an IBM Researcher working on natural language applications. Most recently he worked on text sources for Watson (IBM’s Jeopardy chamption) and applying related DeepQA technology to business problems. His previous work ranged from language processing research to product development and technical planning; in particular, he lead the development of interactions systems that used speech, natural language and focused search. Wlodek Zadrozny received a Ph.D. in Mathematics, from the Polish Academy of Science.
And one more thing. Karaoke at Second on Second in the East Village on Friday night. It’s an unofficial Strata after-party, so come join us Big Data folks for some Big Fun.
The Noisy Channel 