34th European Conference on Information Retrieval

By Paolo Boldi, University of Milano.

Many modern IR problems call for a mixture of classical text-retrieval methods with graph mining techniques, especially within the area of social-network search: information extraction from graphs may be performed to help search, to improve ranking or just to gain some structural knowledge about the network we are dealing with. Although graph algorithmics is by now a mature and rich field, the explosive growth in size of the graphs under observation poses new challenges and requires new approaches even to solve apparently trivial problems. In this talk, I will discuss what are the consequences of this new situation, and I will present some examples on how one can cope with it.

Paolo Boldi obtained his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Milano, where he is currently Associate Professor. His research interests touched many different topics in theoretical and applied computer science, such as: domain theory, non-classical computability theory, distributed computability, anonymous networks, sense of direction, self-stabilizing systems. Recently, his works focused on problems related to the World-Wide Web, a field where his research has also produced software tools used by many people working in the same area.

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By Yoelle Maarek, Yahoo! Labs, Haifa.

Usage data information at a large scale has brought tremendous value to Web search engines and is exploited at every level, to provide more relevant results, to improve user experience, to validate an experimental feature etc. Most users do not realize how critical their implicit feedback has become in today’s search engines. Usage data cannot (should not?) be exploited to its full extent however as it often conflicts with users’ personalization needs and privacy concerns. In this talk, I will review both the explicit and implicit roles of users in the major Web search engines, reviewing the key aspects of search engine user interaction and what implicit and explicit, and sometimes surprising, roles users play in each of these aspects. I will also discuss the limitations and inherent risks of exploiting usage data and some potential future research directions that could help circumvent these limitations.

Yoelle Maarek is the Senior Director of Yahoo! Research in Israel. Prior to this, Yoelle was the Director of Google Haifa Engineering Center, which she opened in 2006 and grew to close to 40 staff members. There, she led the development of "Suggest", Google's query completion feature deployed on google.com and YouTube worldwide. From 1989 until 2006, Yoelle was with IBM Research, first in the US, and then in Israel, where she held a number of management and technical positions, up to Department Group Manager and Distinguished Engineer. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Technion, in Haifa, Israel, in 1989, during her PhD studies, she spent a year at Columbia University in New York. She graduated from the "Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees" in Paris, France, and received her DEA (graduate degree) in Computer Science from Paris VI University, both in 1985. Yoelle has published over 50 articles in fields related to IR, Web search and Web applications. She has served as regular or senior PC member at most recent SIGIR, WWW and WSDM conferences, as PC chair of WWW'2009 and is currently serving as PC chair for WSDM'2012 and SIGIR'2012. Yoelle is a member of the Board of Governors of the Technion and was appointed ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2010.

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