IAS/ Departmental Seminar, CS104: Talk of Prof. Wolfgang Nejdl, Hannover University
2011-01-27 16:00 - 17:00
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/
