Information Theory Seminar

TITLE: Mining the Web: Search Engines

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

DATE: 3:00 - 4:00 P.M., Tuesday July 15, 2003

LOCATION: Sigma, 1L (PA)

HOST: Gadiel Seroussi

ABSTRACT:

The Web grows and evolves faster than we like and expect, imposing scalability and relevance problems to Web search engines. In this talk we present how mining Web data and usage logs allows to improve a search engine in several ways: page ranking, indices and interfaces. As a corollary we show several interesting relations of different Web characteristics: structure, dynamics, "quality", etc. Our results help to understand not only technical issues, but also social ones, as the Web is the collaborative work of many people, a few publishing, and all of them querying.

Bio:

Ricardo Baeza-Yates obtained a Ph.D. in CS at U. of Waterloo, Canada, in 1989. In 1992 he was elected president of the Chilean Computer Science Society (SCCC) until 1995, being elected again in 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 recently 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 computer science to achieve this position in Chile. Currently he is a professor at the CS department of the University of Chile, where he was the chair in the period 1993-95. He is also director of the Center for Web Research, a project funded by the Millenium Scientific Initiative. 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.