So, while posting my cycling episodes was fun, the main purpose of my trip to Edinburgh and Cambridge was as a delegate to WWW 2006, the 15th International World Wide Web Conference. This is one of the two conferences I’ve typically been involved with; the other being SIGIR coming up in August. In theory, I had planned on blogging during the conference, but it turns out that the wifi at the Edinburgh International Conference Center wasn’t up to the task of providing some 1000 people with laptops access… and I ended up getting quite busy to actually blog with some thought (turns out posting a narrative on pictures is far easier! probably more entertaining to my readers as well. nonetheless…)
Anyway, now that I’ve had some time to write down some thoughts, without further ado here they are:
The International World Wide Web Conference was held in Edinburgh, Scotland, from May 22nd -> 26th, 2006. What follows is a brief trip report on the conference, including some of the talks and as is often the case the more interesting conversations that happened outside the talks.
Attendees
The conference was well attended, although it did feel that student attendance was less than it had been in previous years (perhaps due to the rather steep increase in registration costs). Microsoft had over 30 employees attend, from various groups. Yahoo and Google were also there in force, although the delegates from Yahoo were some of their more senior people like Prabhakar and Andrei. There were also a number of people there from IBM and Ask.com. The conference itself was split mostly into two main camps, as it has been in years past: those interested in search, and those interested in the semantic web.
Interesting Talks
Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all had very heavily attended talks and were for the most part all quite good. I’ll wasn’t able to personally see them all, but will provide some short summaries for those I was able to catch. Microsoft had 7 papers there, which is quite a good showing. I was also impressed that Google appears to be trying to get back into having its people publish. They’ve been given a fair amount of grief for people going to Google and then stopping all publishing. I’m not sure if the 3 papers done by Google is an answer to that or just coincidence, but I suspect they may be trying to counter public opinion. Yahoo also has a tutorial on ads, by their big guns (Andrei Broder, Prabhakar Raghaven, Ricardo Baeza-Yates).
Google Talks (3):
A Web-based Kernel Function for Measuring the Similarity of Short Text Snippets
Mehran Sahami
Timothy D. Heilman
Mehran gave a great talk on a new kernel function that they used to measure short text snippets; in particular, this was useful for discovering similar queries (although it should be noted that this would be useful for other things, not just finding similar queries).
Retroactive Answering of Search Queries
Beverly Yang
Glen Jeh
Beverly’s talk showed an interesting glimpse of where Google is going with personalization. The paper dealt with an alternative approach to Alerts. Google found that most people don’t sign up for alerts (meaning alerting them when a new result for a query arrives), and that when they do its for a very short time. What they’re trying to do is create alerts automatically based on a search history. The idea is primarily in concept phase; for evaluation, they just used a bunch of Google engineers. But it does seem to be an interesting way to handle alerts and creating some personalization that users can understand.
Browsing on Small Screens: Recasting Web-Page Segmentation into an Efficient Machine Learning Framework
Shumeet Baluja
Yahoo Talks (3):
Visualizing Tags over Time
Micah Dubinko
Ravi Kumar
Joseph Magnani
Jasmine Novak
Prabhakar Raghavan
Andrew Tomkins
I didn’t see this talk, but heard it was quite good.
Generating Query Substitutions
Rosie Jones
Benjamin Rey
Omid Madani
Wiley Greiner
Rosie gave a talk that highlighted some of what Yahoo is doing as far as query substitutions, which includes spelling. They were especially interested in handling this in the advertising case, so they could more easily match ads against a query even though the advertiser may not have used the most appropriate terms.
Searching with Context
Reiner Kraft
Chi Chao Chang
Farzin Maghoul
Ravi Kumar
Reiner’s talk presented a couple different ways to augment a query using terms extracted from the search context (for example, the web page the user is currently browsing, or terms from previous queries).
A Google AND Yahoo Talk (technically, an IBM paper, as the G & Y authors were both at IBM at the time):
Using Annotations in Enterprise Search
Pavel A. Dmitriev
Nadav Eiron
Marcus Fontoura
Eugene Shekita
Interesting Talks – Academia & Other
Off the Beaten Tracks: Exploring Three Aspects of Web Navigation
Harald Weinreich
Hartmut Obendorf
Eelco Herder
Matthias Mayer
Winner of Best Student Paper Award
Random Sampling from a Search Engine’s Index
Ziv Bar-Yossef
Maxim Gurevich
Winner of Best Paper Award
Microsoft Talks (7):
Time-Dependent Semantic Similarity Measure of Queries Using Historical Click-Through Data
Qiankun Zhao
Steven C. H. Hoi
Tie-Yan Liu
Sourav S Bhowmick
Michael R. Lyu
Wei-Ying Ma
A Comparison of Implicit and Explicit Links for Web Page Classification
Dou Shen
Jian-Tao Sun
Qiang Yang
Zheng Chen
Beyond PageRank: Machine Learning for Static Ranking
Matthew Richardson
Amit Prakash
Eric Brill
Finding Advertising Keywords on Web Pages
Wen-tau Yih
Joshua Goodman
Vitor R. Carvalho
Detecting Online Commercial Intention (OCI)
Honghua Dai
Lingzhi Zhao
Zaiqing Nie
Ji-Rong Wen
Lee Wang
Ying Li
Detecting Spam Web Pages through Content Analysis
Alexandros Ntoulas
Marc Najork
Mark Manasse
Dennis Fetterly
The case for multi-user design for computer aided learning in developing regions
Joyojeet Pal
Udai Singh Pawar
Eric Brewer
Kentaro Toyama