RecSys ‘07 August 4, 2007
Posted by Andre Vellino in Collaborative filtering, Data Mining, Information retrieval, Recommender service.add a comment
The RecSys 2007 conference program (October 19-20, Minneapolis) looks fantastic! The keynote is by Krishna Bharat, who invented Google News. The research track has several papers on explanation and user-control, which is what’s most needed for advancing recommender system adoption, IMO.
There’s lots to look forward to and learn about. One thing from our “home and native land” (University of Saskatchewan, to be precise) that I didn’t know about is the KeepUp News / RSS recommender.
SIGIR 2007 August 3, 2007
Posted by Andre Vellino in Data Mining, Information retrieval, Statistical Semantics.add a comment
I’ve just returned from SIGIR 2007. As you’d expect, the participants and presenters at this conference this year were dominated by search-engine research labs: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, Baidu.
There’s no doubt that the lure of financial reward is drawing the best minds in Information Retrieval away from academic institutions and into the big search-engine companies. One has to worry about this trend. Even though there is a lot of collegiality between individual researchers from different corporations, there are also market pressures that make novel IR techniques proprietary. This can’t be good for intellectual freedom or the advancement of knowledge.
