[Asis-l] iSchool talks / Thu 21 July 2005, Ricardo Baeza-Yates / Univ. of Chile / Web Query Mining

[Efthimis Efthimiadis]

Date: Thursday July 21, 2005
Time: 11:00am -12:00pm
Room: Mary Gates Hall 420
Sponsors: The Information School and the ASIST Student Chapter
Host: Efthimis N. Efthimiadis, iSchool, UW

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Web Query Mining

Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Center for Web Research
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Chile

User queries in search engines and Websites give valuable information on
the interests of people. In addition, clicks after queries relate those
interests to actual content. Even queries without answers imply
important missing synonims or content. In this talk we show several
examples on how to use this information to improve the performance of
search engines, to recommend better queries, and to improve the
information scent of the content of a Website.

Short Bio:

Ricardo Baeza-Yates is professor and chair of the CS department of the
University of Chile. He is also director of the Center for Web Research,
a project funded by the Millennium Scientific Initiative.
He obtained a Ph.D. in CS from U. of Waterloo, Canada, 1989.  He has
been president of the Chilean Computer Science Society (SCCC) from 1992
until 1995, being elected again for 1997-98.
During 1993, he received the Organization of American States award for
young researchers in exact sciences. In 1994 he received the award to
the best engineering research in the last 4 years from the Institute of
Engineers of Chile. In 1997 with two Brazilian colleagues obtained the
COMPAQ prize to the best Brazilian research article in CS.
He was elected to the IEEE CS Board of Governors for the period 2002-04.
In 2002 he was appointed to the Chilean Academy of Sciences, being the
first person from CS to achieve this position in Chile. His research
interests include information retrieval, algorithms, and information
visualization.  He is co-author of the book Modern Information
Retrieval, published in 1999 by Addison-Wesley, as well as co-author of
the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures,
Addison-Wesley, 1991; and co-editor of Information Retrieval:
Algorithms and Data Structures, Prentice-Hall, 1992.

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Efthimis N. Efthimiadis <efthimis at u.washington.edu>
Associate Professor    
The Information School, University of Washington       
Suite 370 Mary Gates Hall, Box 352840     
Seattle, WA 98195-2840, USA     
tel.(off.) 206-616-6077, (sch) 206-685-9937, fax. 206-616-3152
http://faculty.washington.edu/efthimis
http://www.sigir2006.org
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