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New England Database Society sponsored by Netezza Corporation |
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NEDS |
The
Future
of Search and Information Discovery
Raghu Ramakrishnan
Yahoo! Research
Friday, February 24, 2012, 4PM
HP/Vertica Computer Science Lounge (Volen 104),
Brandeis University
(preceded by a wine and cheese reception at 3:00 pm, and followed by dinner at 6:00 pm)
Abstract:
Web search has traditionally
focused on returning the most relevant URLs for a user's search query
terms, and portals have concentrated on aggregating and presenting
information in ways designed to facilitate browsing and topical
exploration. Search has been driven by algorithmic ranking approaches,
and portals have relied on human curation and editorial judgement. In
recent years, however, web search and content optimization for portals
have come closer, and are proceeding on a path towards greater
convergence. On the one hand, search is increasingly focused on
understanding a user's intent more precisely and delivering the
appropriate results, be it URLs or aggregated information distilled
from diverse sources, as evidenced by the proliferation of features
like search assist and direct displays. This trend is accompanied by
significant shifts in the underlying technology as well, with a great
emphasis being placed on building knowledge bases that describe
searchable concepts in rich semantic terms, to enable delivery of
aggregated results. On the other hand, there is a shift in how portal
content is being programmed as well, with an increasing blend of
algorithmic ranking and editorial policy, and the explicit goal of
delivering personalized content that is responsive to the user's
current information need. In this talk, I will discuss this trend using
examples drawn from Yahoo!'s search and portal properties, and the
science that underpins them.
Raghu Ramakrishnan is Chief
Scientist for Search and Cloud Platforms at Yahoo!, and is a Yahoo!
Fellow, heading the Web Information Management research group. His work
in database systems, with a focus on data mining, query optimization,
and web-scale data management, has influenced query optimization in
commercial database systems and the design of window functions in
SQL:1999. His paper on the Birch clustering algorithm received the
SIGMOD 10-Year Test-of-Time award, and he has written the widely-used
text "Database Management Systems" (with Johannes Gehrke). His current
research interests are in cloud computing, content optimization, and
the development of a "web of concepts" that indexes all information on
the web in semantically rich terms. Ramakrishnan has received several
awards, including the ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, the ACM SIGMOD
Contributions Award, a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, a
Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and an NSF
Presidential Young Investigator Award. He is a Fellow of the ACM and
IEEE.
Ramakrishnan is on the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD, and is a past
Chair of ACM SIGMOD and member of the Board of Trustees of the VLDB
Endowment. He was Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that
pioneered crowd-sourcing, specifically question-answering communities,
powering Ask Jeeves' AnswerPoint as well as customer-support for
companies such as Compaq.
Maintained by Olga Papaemmanouil olga AT cs.brandeis.edu