We are very proud to announce, within the ICWE 2014 conference program, two top keynote speakers:

  • Marc Najork, Google, USA: “Social search”

    Abstract: This talk discusses the interplay of “Social” and “Search”. Social signals can be used to improve the relevance of algorithmic search results, and information retrieval techniques can be used to surface content from social networks. I will give an overview of the ways in which social content is used to improve the Bing search experience, and at a more abstract level will discuss how signals from a variety of social networks can be used to improve the user’s experience in different task scenarios. I will also touch on some problematic aspects of leveraging social information, such as demographics of the user base and trustworthiness of postings. 

    Bio: Marc Najork is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, working on search infrastructure.  Before joining Google in 2014, Marc was a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, where he worked on numerous problems related to web search. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2001, Marc spent eight years at Digital Equipment’s Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, where he designed and built Mercator, a high-performance distributed web crawler that eventually became the standard web crawler of AltaVista. Marc holds 23 US patents and has written about 60 papers. He served as program co-chair of the 2004 International World Wide Web Conference and conference chair of the 2008 ACM Intl. Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on the Web, and co-chaired the news section of the Communications of the ACM from 2008-2014.  Marc received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

  • Ricardo Baeza-Yates, “Wisdom of the Crowds or Wisdom of a Few”, Yahoo! Labs

    Abstract: The Web continues to grow and evolve very fast, changing our daily 
    lives. This activity represents the collaborative work of the millions of institutions and people that contribute content to the Web as well as more than two billion people that use it. In this ocean of hyperlinked data there is explicit and implicit information and knowledge. But how is the Web? What are the activities of people? Web data mining is the main approach to answer these question. Web data comes in three main flavors: content (text, images, etc.), structure (hyperlinks) and usage (navigation, queries, etc.), implying different techniques such as text, graph or log mining. Each case reflects the wisdom of some group of people that can be used to make the Web better. For example, user generated tags in Web 2.0 sites. In this presentation we explore the impact of the wisdom of crowds in several dimensions such as bias, privacy and scalability. We also cover related concepts such as the long tail of the special interests of people, or the digital desert, content that nobody sees. 

    Bio: Ricardo Baeza-Yates is VP of Yahoo! Labs for Europe and Latin America, leading the labs at Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile, since 2006. Between 2008 and 2012 he also oversaw the Haifa lab. He is also part time Professor at the Dept. of Information and Communication Technologies of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. During 2005 he was an ICREA research professor at the same university. Until 2004 he was Professor and Director of the Center for Web Research at the Dept. of Computing Science of the University of Chile (in leave of absence until today). He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989. Before he obtained two masters (M.Sc. CS & M.Eng. EE) and the electrical engineering degree from the University of Chile in Santiago. He is co-author of the best-seller Modern Information Retrieval textbook, published in 1999 by Addison-Wesley with a second enlarged edition in 2011,  that won the ASIST 2012 Book of the Year award. He is also 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, among more than 500 other publications. From 2002 to 2004 he was elected to the board of governors of the IEEE Computer Society and in 2012 he was elected for the ACM Council. He has received the Organization of American States award for young researchers in exact sciences (1993), the Graham Medal for innovation in computing given by the University of Waterloo to distinguished ex-alumni (2007), the CLEI Latin American distinction for contributions to CS in the region (2009), and the National Award of the Chilean Association of Engineers (2010), among other distinctions. In 2003 he was the first computer scientist to be elected to the Chilean Academy of Sciences and since 2010 is a founding member of the Chilean Academy of Engineering. In 2009 he was named ACM Fellow and in 2011 IEEE Fellow.

Please have a look at the full program, and join us as at ICWE 2014 in Toulouse!