Department Events
The department runs a variety of seminars, workshops and colloquia. See upcoming events below. You are also welcome to sign up to the seminar mailing list.
For visiting the department, see the map of campus, directions, and accommodation recommendations.
(Be reminded that the University of Warwick is not, surprisingly, located in the town of Warwick.)
IAS/ Departmental Seminar, CS104: Talk of Prof. Wolfgang Nejdl, Hannover University
Title: Web of People -- Improving Search on the Web
Abstract:
More and more information is available on the Web, and the current
search engines do a great job to make it accessible. Yet, optimizing
for a large number of users, they usually provide good answers only to
“most of us", and have yet to provide satisfying mechanisms to search
for audiovisual content.
In this talk I will present ongoing work at L3S addressing these
challenges. I will start by giving a brief overview of Web Science
areas covered at L3S, and the main challenges we adress in these
areas, with the Web of People as one important focal point of our
research, as well as Web Information Management and Web Search.
In the second part of the talk, I will discuss search for audiovisual
content, and how to make this content more accessible. As many of our
algorithms focus on exploiting user generated information, I will
discuss what kinds of tags are used for different resources and how
they can help for search. Collaborative tagging has become an
increasingly popular means for sharing and organizing Web resources,
leading to a huge amount of user generated metadata. These tags
represent different aspects of the resources they describe and it is
not obvious whether and how these tags or subsets of them can be used
for search. I will present an in-depth study of tagging behavior for
different kinds of resources - Web pages, music, and images. I will
also discuss how to enrich existing tags through machine learning
methods, to provide indexing more appropriate to user search behavior.
Short Bio:
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl (born 1960) has been full professor of
computer science at the University of Hannover since 1995. He received
his M.Sc. (1984) and Ph.D. degree (1988) at the Technical University
of Vienna, was assistant professor in Vienna from 1988 to 1992, and
associate professor at the RWTH Aachen from 1992 to 1995. He worked as
visiting researcher / professor at Xerox PARC, Stanford University,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, EPFL Lausanne, and at PUC
Rio.
Prof. Nejdl heads the L3S Research Center as well as the Distributed
Systems Institute / Knowledge Based Systems , and does research in the
areas of search and information retrieval, information systems,
semantic web technologies, peer-to-peer infrastructures, databases,
technology-enhanced learning and artificial intelligence. Some recent
projects in the L3S context include the PHAROS Integrated Project on
audio-visual search, the OKKAM IP focusing on entities on the Web, the
Digital Library EU project LiWA, coordinated by L3S, which
investigates Web archive management and advanced search in such an
archive, and the FET IP project LivingKnowledge, which is developing
algorithms and methods to handle and exploit diversity, bias and
opinion on the Web. Another new project, GLOCAL, focuses on
event-based indexing of multimedia data on the web.
Wolfgang Nejdl published more than 250 scientific articles, as listed
at DBLP, and has been program chair, program committee and editorial
board member of numerous international conferences and journals, most
recently including the role of PC chair for WWW'09 in Madrid, PC chair
for WSDM'11 in HongKong, and general chair for ICDE'11 in Hannover,
see also http://www.kbs.uni-hannover.de/~nejdl/