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Date:
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15 April 2011
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Time:
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09.30-13.30
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Location:
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Bijzondere Collecties - Nina van Leerzaal
Oude Turfmarkt 129, 1012 GC Amsterdam (directions)
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Registration:
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Registration for this seminar is free. To register please send an email to f.w.adriaans@uva.nl
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The event is part of the Advanced Components Stage of the Educational
Program for SIKS-PhD-students. Therefore, SIKS-PhD-students working on the
research foci "Web based Systems" and "Data management, Storage and
Retrieval" are strongly encouraged to participate.
This seminar is generously sponsored by WGI (Vereniging Werkgemeenschap Informatiewetenschap).
Following the seminar is the Ph.D. defence of
Marijn Koolen at 14.00 in the Agnietenkapel of the University of Amsterdam (address: Oudezijds Voorburgwal 231).
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09.30-10.00 Coffee
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10.00-10.30 Mounia Lalmas (Yahoo! Research Barcelona) - Towards a Science of User Engagement (abstract)
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10.30-11.00 Claudia Hauff (Delft University of Technology) - Enhancing Access To Classic Children’s Literature (abstract)
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11.00-11.30 Arjen de Vries (Delft University of Technology and CWI Amsterdam) - Image Search Logs Potpourri (abstract)
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11.30-11.45 Coffee break
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11.45-12.15 Edgar Meij (University of Amsterdam) - Search Engines for the Humanities and Social Sciences (abstract)
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12.15-12.45 Nick Craswell (Bing, Microsoft Research Cambridge) - Power and Fidelity Tradeoffs in IR Evaluation (abstract)
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12.45-13.30 Lunch in the Museumcafé of the Bijzondere Collecties
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(end of seminar)
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14.00-15:00 Ph.D. defence of Marijn Koolen. The Meaning of Structure: the Value of Link Evidence for Information Retrieval. Location: Agnietenkapel, Oudezijds Voorburgwal 231, Amsterdam (a mere 300 metres from the Bijzondere Collecties).
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Towards a Science of User Engagement
Mounia Lalmas, Yahoo! Research Barcelona
I will present some research ideas on how to measure user engagement. User engagement is a quality of user experience that emphasises the positive aspects of interaction, and in particular the phenomena associated with being captivated by technology. Successful technologies are not just used, they are engaged with. Engagement is measured in many ways, by subjective (e.g., questionnaires) and objective (e.g., number of clicks) measures. However, not much has been done in terms of validating and relating these and so providing a firm basis for assessing the quality of the user experience. My proposal looks at combining techniques from web analytics, information retrieval evaluation, and existing works on user engagement coming from the information science community. I will also discuss how the related areas of game immersion and non-intrusive technologies may provide novel insights into developing effective measures and models of user engagement.
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Enhancing Access To Classic Children’s Literature
Claudia Hauff, Delft University of Technology
A number of digital libraries (such as Project Gutenberg)
contain mostly public domain books, including a significant number of
works that belong to children's literature. Many of these classic
books are offered in a text-only format, which does not make them
appealing for children to read. Moreover, stories that were written
for children one hundred or more years ago, might not be readily
understandable by children today due to diverging vocabularies and
experiences. In this talk, I will describe ongoing work to enhance the
access to children's literature repositories which includes automatic
story illustration and linking of texts to background information.
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Image Search Logs Potpourri
Arjen de Vries, Delft University of Technology and CWI Amsterdam
In context of the FP6 Vitalas project, we gained access to the usage
logs of the Belga (commercial) online picture portal, capturing the
real-life use of the news agency's photo site. We have studied the
usefulness of these logs on their potential to improve information
retrieval tasks, and in this talk I will summarize (what I found) the
most interesting findings of our research to date.
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Search Engines for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Edgar Meij, University of Amsterdam
Data transitions have revolutionized many scientific disciplines, starting with the exact sciences, via the life sciences, and now the social sciences and humanities are in the process of making the transition to becoming data intensive sciences, with descriptions through quantitative measurements. Publicly accessible utterances, opinions, transactions, and interactions resulting from widespread internet and social media usage facilitate new, data-intensive research methods in disciplines that have so far relied on traditional methods such as small-scale literature or panel studies.
To illustrate the new possibilities, I will report on two pilot projects carried out by cross-disciplinary teams consisting of computer scientists and researchers from the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology and religious studies. In my presentation I will focus on lessons learned, methodological innovations, and on technical innovations required from computer scientists building the enabling technology, mainly having to do with ranking principles and text selecting facilities.
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Power and Fidelity Tradeoffs in IR Evaluation
Nick Craswell, Microsoft
Some organizations make a big ongoing investment in improving their information retrieval system. After a long series of improvements to indexing, query analysis and ranking, you may begin to make improvements that are small and rely on subtle user preferences between different types of document. These improvements are hard to measure in a user study or by observing clicks, because such experiments are not very sensitive. Smaller improvements are easier to measure with a Cranfield-style experiment, but do you trust that your relevance judgments and metrics reflect the opinions of real users? I’ll present some of these tradeoffs in detail, and describe some interesting options like interleaving.
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