Search: “"sigir 2009"”

The last session of the SIGIR 2009 Industry Track was the enterprise search vendor panel. Originally, I’d hoped to have CTOs (or the equivalent) from Autonomy, Endeca, and FAST–specifically, Peter Menell (CTO of Autonomy), Adam Ferrari (CTO of Endeca), and Bjørn Olstad (formerly CTO of FAST, now a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer). Since it would have […]

The morning sessions of the SIGIR 2009 Industry Track consisted of five individual presentations; the afternoon consisted of two panels. The requirement to synchronize with the research talks led to the allocation of 90 minutes for each panel–which was a bit more than I’d originally planned on (and this change, like many, occurred in the […]

One of the things I didn’t consider when I signed on to organize the SIGIR 2009 Industry Track was that I’d have to replace speakers and panelists on less than two weeks’ notice. But what I couldn’t even have imagined was replacing a speaker on less than 24 hours’ notice! Tuesday morning, the second day […]

Back to our regularly scheduled blogging about the SIGIR 2009 Industry Track. For those who haven’t been reading along, we covered the first three talks: Matt Cutts (Google): Web Spam and Adversarial IR: The Road Ahead danah boyd (Microsoft Research): The Searchable Nature of Acts in Networked Publics Vanja Josifovski (Yahoo! Research): Ad Retrieval – […]

After the conference banquet at JFK Library and Museum, a few of us went to Bukowski for beers. At one point in the conversation, a friend of mine railed against computational advertising as a research topic. I didn’t quite have the nerve to reply that it was one of the topics I’d picked for the […]

After I secured Matt Cutts as a speaker for the SIGIR 2009 Industry Track, I suppose I became a bit cocky. I decided that I wanted another speaker who would not only be interesting, but also would have the star power to put the event on the map. One of my topics on my list […]

At last we arrive at the SIGIR 2009 Industry Track. Since I organized this track (which mainly involved coming up with a program and then actually producing the speakers), I’m not exactly an impartial observer. But hopefully the organizers of future industry tracks will benefit from my perspective as an organizer. Last December (New Year’s […]

Albert-László Barabási is one of the biggest names in networking theory, up there with Jon Kleinberg and Duncan Watts. Since he was the only one of those three whom I hadn’t met, I was thrilled to discover that he was giving a keynote at SIGIR 2009, entitled “From Networks to Human Behavior“. Much the keynote […]

At the two previous SIGIR conferences that I attended, the interactive search sessions were the most interesting, and this one was no exception. Ironically, even though many of us (myself included) feel that interaction is marginalized within the SIGIR conference and even the information retrieval research community, the few interaction talks at SIGIR consistently draw […]

Sorry for the delay in postings. Not only was I super-busy the past week, but I had some connectivity challenges (both at SIGIR and at the apartment where I was staying) and mostly restricted my online activity to occasional tweets during talks. I meant to catch up on my blogging yesterday, but instead spent the […]