WSDM 2010 Starts Today

Today is the beginning of the Web Search and Data Mining conference, WSDM 2010. You can follow the conference on Twitter, #wsdm2010 as Daniel Tunkelang, Ian Soboroff, and others are tweeting it. The proceedings are also available. I hope to highlight some of the papers here in future posts.

Two of my UMass CIIR friends and colleagues have papers that they are presenting:

• Learning Concept Importance Using a Weighted Dependence Model by Michael Bendersky
• Query Reformulation Using Anchor Text by Van Dang

Good luck to them, and check out their papers.

Since I don't have a paper, I'm not attending. As a side note, I think that academic conferences should drop the registration fee for students. I would have been able to afford the travel given the proximity, but the registration fee was prohibitively expensive for me.

For those of you attending, please take notes and share them!

Search in Social Media 2010 Coverage

Yesterday was the Search in Social Media (SSM) 2010 workshop. Daniel posted his summary. You can also read the tweet stream.

Of particular note is the coverage of Jan Pedersen's keynote where he highlighted some opportunities and challenges with SSM.

The benefits of social media search include trust and personal interaction (as compared to web content that is often soulless and of uncertain provenance), low latency (though perhaps at the cost of accuracy), and access to niche or ephemeral information that web search rarely surfaces.

I look forward to reading more coverage and getting other perspectives on the event.

Search in Social Media Workshop at WSDM

Today is the Search in Social Media Workshop, SSM 2010. Unfortunately, I'm not attending, but you should follow the coverage on Twitter, #SSM2010. You can read the papers from the program. However, the really interesting parts will be the Keynote from Jan Pederson and thee panel discussions:

• The Big Players and Integrating Social Media
• Social Media Companies - How does search fit?
• What are the most important research problems for SSM?

I look forward to reading the coverage!