Slavko’s weblog

ESSIR 2011, Day 3

Today Ricardo Baeza-Yates was the keynote speaker. He is very famous researcher in the field of Information Retrieval and leads the Yahoo! Research Labs. The keynote was mostly about webscale algorithms and some interesting IR insights. One of them is the notion of adversarial level of access for the internet which seems to be more than just public. Another interesting thing is that this year’s internet usage research showed there are about 400million of servers and 800million of clients – so there exits 1 server for 2 clients. Another phenomenon is that many people think Google PageRank is still very important, but it is only one of the many features at Learning To Rank task.

Keynote presentation:

The next speaker Andreas Hotho talked about IR in Social Media. He focused on collaborative tagging, folksonomies and some network properties (for example on Delicio.us). At their site http://www.bibsonomy.org/ a number of documents are tagged for bookmarks sharing or scientific use. By Golder & Huberman the tags could be clustered into 7 groups. To me the more interesting notions seem the definition of Folksonomies – “Folksonomies allow users to assign tags to resources”, and Logsonomies – “Logsonomies allow users to assign resources to query terms”. At the end he also mentioned his algorithm FolkRank (it’s purpose can be identified from the name) and some recommendations for folksonomies.

Another interesting product he mentioned is also Piggy Bank – Firefox plugin, developed at MIT and is intended to extract data from the web depending on manually predefined site scrappers.

Andreas’ presentations:

The last lecture was conducted by Tran Duc Thanh, which has recently got his PhD and is very successful scientist. He was lecturing about semantic search. At slides around 22 there are some indentical ideas to our IOBIE system. Then the majority of the talk was about matching at three dimensions and top-K algorithms for ranking. The ObjectRanking (slide 63) could be useful for ranking recognized entities in IOBIE.

The last session was the Plenary Discussion – Sharing PhD experiences and recommendations from ESSIR lecturers. Some interesting answers / reccomendations were (mostly by Ricardo):

• “Research, you have to live it”
• “Do not think what you have to do – just do it!”
• “Why do you need PhD to start the company?”
• “Do PhD or not?”, “Depends on passion. If not sure, do not do it.”
• For PhD research you need a life-label: “Invent problems, …, incremental research may not be appropriate”
• “Go to as many seminars as you can, even if you do not understand the title.”

The most I liked the following one: “If you get through PhD, you are emotionally robust!”

Our ESSIR lecturers during the discussion:

In the evening we went to the informal walk around Koblenz, guided by dr. Sergej Sizov, the main organizer of ESSIR 2011.

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ESSIR 2011, Day 2

Yesterday, on monday the first lectures have began. At 9a.m. we first got our ids. Then I “outsourced” the printing of my poster to organization team at info-point .

After some coffee, the keynote of Nigel Shadbolt started. Nigel is a professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the University of Southampton. As I had supposed before, Tim-Berners Lee and hid proposal of internet was mentioned. Then he presented the overview of the Information Extraction field as it is supposed to be for opening talks. His also introduced us his notion about the importance of people over algorithms we are forgetting about. The next big words I remember were that subfields of IR are not connected to traditional Artificial Intelligence, but may be better to say Augmented Intelligence.

As the keynote presentation is too big, you can retrieve it here: http://zitnik.si/temp/essir2011/01_NigelShatbolt_keynote.pdf

The next two-part lecture Foundations: Models and Methods was given by Hinrich Schuetze. He was one of the authors of the book Introduction to information retrieval which I read before writing my bachelor thesis. That is why I was very familiar with presentation. His presentations and links are also available on http://informationretrieval.org/essir2011. He lectured some introduction to Boolean model (he emphasized about feast or famine mostly), Vector model, Ranking (interesting was what is the sequence user looks at the results, that 30% users will click even the nonrelevant result, nicely presented difference between Euclidean and cosine similarity, pivot normalization, …), Probabilistic models, Language models and finally Learning to Rank.

Schuetze’s presentation:

The las lecture was given by Vladimir Batagelj, the “godfather” of Pajek. He presented the program Pajek and many interesting properties of network analysis, which I’ve also heard about at his course on Large network analysis during my PhD study.

In the evening the beachvolley was planned but because of the wind we went to mexican restaurant Enchiliada. There Lars showed us some game with glasses (by that you may separate stupid and smart people – maybe :), I successfully passed the test).

Before going back to hotel Sholz we needed to go to the German corner to take some pictures:

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ESSIR 2011, Day 1

On the 28th of August 2011, Kaja Vidmar and I went to Koblenz to attent to the 8th European Summer School of Information Retrieval – ESSIR 2011.

First we flew from Brnik to Frankfurt at 8 a.m. in the morning. In Frankfurt we bought tickets for regional train to Koblenz at 10:37. As there were no data about the route, we somehow managed to get some information from sour lady at DBahn info-point. At around 1 p.m. we got to Sholz hotel, where we checked in and first unpacked our laptops.

After some time, we got out. We got over almost the whole Koblenz on foot, eat at MacDonald’s and got acquainted with the city. At 7:40 p.m. we entered the Gecko lounge where there was a Get-together event for the participants. We got to know some nice people, mostly younger researchers, mainly from the fields of Information Retrival, Data Mining, Social Network Analysis and also Software Engineering.

At around midnight we arrived to Sholz hotel, where I am writing this post.

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S kolesom do Pule

S kolegom Miho Longinom sva se 6.8.2011 odpravila s kolesom proti Puli. Plan je bil, da se najprej ustaviva z v kampu Lucija, nato v Poreču in nazadnje v Puli. Med temi postajami pa bi naredila vsakič 2 dni odmora.

Prvi dan: Jaz sem pot pričel na Vrbičju proti Ljubljani. Okoli 6h zjutraj sva se z Miho dobila pred FRI-jem in se napotila proti Portorožu. Prvi incident se je zgodil že na Vrhniškem klancu, ko je Mihi počila zadnja guma. Na srečo sem imel s sabo rezervno, zato sva lahko problem hitro rešila. Nadalje sva se ustavila v Logatcu na bencinski črpalki, kjer sva se okrepčala. Tam sem tudi v obcestni trgovini s kolesi Cult kupil novo zračnico. Do Kopra pa je manjše tehnične težave imelo moje kolo, saj sem moral nekajkrat ročno priviti “špice” na zadnjem platišču. V Kopru sva si v Tuš centru privoščila kosilo – seveda na študentske bone. Nato naju je le kratka razdalja ločila do Lucije, ki sva jo hitro dosegla. Pred tem pa je meni v Portorožu počila sprednja guma, ki sem jo lahko na srečo spet zamenjal in spet privil zadnje “špice”. Zvečer sva se prehitro podala na žur, ki se je začel šele po 23h, zato sva se optimistično odločila nekaj časa spočiti v kampu, kar je seveda pomenilo, da sva vse prespala.

Drugi dan: Ta dan sva preživela na slovenski obali. Zajtrk in kosilo je bilo seveda na študentske bone, zvečer pa ni bilo nobenega dogajanja. Kolegica iz avtobusne postaje nama je namignila, da se zna kaj dogajati v klubu Ayala, vendar ni bilo nič. Torej je sledilo spanje, pred katerim sem si še kupil penasto podlogo za spanje. Zaradi bolj primerne temperature sem spal zunaj v sožitju z lokalnimi ježi.

Tretji dan: Miha je predčasno ustal in še preden sem dojel, je spakiral šotor in mi sporočil, da zaradi boležin v mišicah in glavobola odhaja domov. Na recepciji si je izprosil lekadol, poklical taxi, ki ga je zapeljal do Kopra in z vlakom odšel domov. Jaz sem se ta dan zapeljal do Umaga, kjer sem na poti v Villi Zianni preveril, če imajo moj polnilec za mobitel, ki ga niso imeli. Nato sem se vrnil v portorož, kjer me je popoldne prišel iskat Peter Virant, saj se mi ni ljubilo samemu nadaljevati vožnje.

Ker se je “planirana tura” končala prehitro, bo treba splanirati novo.

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