Cornell University

WSDM (pronounced “wisdom”) 2017 is the 10th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining and is one of the premier conferences that features such web-inspired research. Claire Cardie will be a keynote speaker at the conference early next year in Cambridge, UK.

Kudos to grad student Shuo Chen, who received the 2016 KDD Best Student Research Paper Award – Runner Up at the ACM Conference for Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Chen is advised by CS Professor Thorsten Joachims. The paper describes a new learning method for representing pairwise preferences, even when these preferences are intransitive and when they depend on context. For example, the method can model that a user may prefer restaurant A over restaurant B for lunch, but that the preference is the other way around for a romantic dinner.

In addition, Joachims’ grad student Tobias Schnabel won the ICTIR Best Presentation Award for his talk at the ACM Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval. He presented a paper, co-authored by Adith Swaminathan, Peter Frazier, and Thorsten Joachims, on a sampling-based method for comparing the quality of search engines and other AI systems. Unlike the conventional TREC evaluation methodology, the new method is unbiased and requires substantially fewer human relevance judgments to give reliable results.

CS Chair Fred Schneider will deliver a keynote address at the 16th International Conference on Runtime Verification (RV 2016) in Madrid, Spain, on September 30. His talk is titled "Why Tags Could be it” and focuses on expressive classes of tags that label data as an alternative means of policy enforcement.

Jon Kleinberg was quoted in a Communications of the ACM article on proposals by Brewster Kahle, Tim Berners-Lee, and others to re-architect some of the fundamental aspects of the Web. As the article writes, "The goals are to offer reliability, integrity, and privacy not easily obtained today, and to preserve a complete and accurate archive of all Web activity." 

From the article: 
Jon Kleinberg, a computer science professor at Cornell University who specializes in large-scale social and information networks, applauds these notions for ensuring the integrity and stability of Web content. "A lot of the technologies [Kahle] talks about are cryptographic at their heart," he says. "When I read something, I want to be confident of its authorship, and I want to read things without worrying that other people are monitoring what I'm reading." Yet Kleinberg warns of difficulties in achieving these goals. "The Web is a huge system; what sorts of systems at Web scale can realistically be built? It's hard to tell exactly what is going to be technologically feasible." 

Full article found here.