The Noisy Channel

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 […]

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Just a heads up that Danah Boyd has published her PhD dissertaion entitled “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics“. Danah is a rock star in the social networking research community; you might have noitced that I cite her Master’s Thesis from time to time. I’m looking forward to reading her latest […]

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CIKM 2011 is nearly a year away, but I wanted to give folks a heads up about the Industry Event there that I am organizing with Tony Russell-Rose. These events have become an an increasingly important part of the annual CIKM and SIGIR conferences, and I believe they are helping to bridge the gap between scholarship […]

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A lunch conversation during the Transparent Text symposium about transparency in social media (also a hot topic in the Ethics of Blogging panel) led me to watch the following presentation from Lawrence Lessig on “Privacy 2.0“: Another topic in that conversation was pseudonymity. Someone pointed to a 2000 USENIX paper entitled “Can Pseudonymity Really Guarantee […]

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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 – […]

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Matt Cutts. danah boyd. Bruce Croft. Marti Hearst. What do these people have in common? If you’re thinking that they are some of the biggest names in the research and practice of search and information retrieval, then you have at least part of the answer. For full credit, the answer is that they are some […]

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As promised, here are my slides from the recently held Text Analytics Summit. Feel free to download them from SlideShare–some of the animation may not come through in this version (though I try to use such animation sparingly). I enjoyed the conference, and was pleasantly surprised by the overall intellectual level of participants, who included […]

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At long last, SIGIR 2009 has posted the program for the Industry Track! It will take place on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 during the regular conference program (in parallel with the technical tracks). There is no additional registration fee for full conference attendees, but there is a one-day registration option for people who only want […]

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Several weeks ago, I announced that I’d be organizing the Industry Track at SIGIR ‘09. Some of you offered helpful suggestions, and many people expressed excitement at this opportunity to bring together the too-often separate worlds of research and practice. Today, I am proud to share more details about the Industry Track. It will take […]

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Bruce Schneier had a a column in the Wall Street Journal a few days ago entitled “Why Obama Should Keep His BlackBerry – But Won’t“. He uses Obama’s BlackBerry dilemma to make the broader point that, we’ve moved from an assumption of privacy to a world where everything is recorded. His argument is that, rather […]

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