New Conference on Web Search and Data Mining

Posted by Ziv Bar-Yossef and Kevin McCurley, Research Team

The pace of innovation on the World Wide Web continues unabated more than fifteen years after the first servers went live. The web was initially used by only a small community of scientists, but there are now over a billion people on the planet who use the web in their lives. The World Wide Web grows and changes as a young organism might, reflecting the social forces of the users and information producers. Each year seems to bring a radical new change, including the movement of commerce to the web, the availability of realtime news on the web, mobile users being able to access the web from anywhere, new forms of media such as video, and the emergence of blogs changing politics and publishing.

This rapid pace of innovation and scale presents many interesting research questions. At Google our goal is to organize information in ways that are useful to users, and we regularly find ourselves solving problems that seemed like ridiculous thought experiments just a few years ago. We therefore welcome the arrival of a new conference on Web Search and Data Mining, prosaically named with the acronym WSDM (pronounced as wisdom). WSDM is intended to be complementary to the World Wide Web Conference tracks in search and data mining. The soaring volume of submissions to these two tracks over the past few years justifies the foundation of a new top-tier conference on web search and mining. WSDM is a joint effort of researchers from the three large search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) as well as top-notch scientists from the Academia (such as Jon Kleinberg from Cornell, Rajeev Motwani from Stanford, and Monika Henzinger from Google and EPFL). The first WSDM conference will take place at Stanford University (the place where both Google and Yahoo! were conceived by their founders). The conference will be held in February of 2008, and the deadline for submissions is July 30, 2007. For further information see the WSDM web site. If you have good papers on search or data mining in the pipeline, please consider sending them to WSDM.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Videos of talks

Posted by Kevin McCurley, Research Team

We've recently launched a Google Research web site that we'll be updating to provide information about research activities at Google. Among other things, one thing you'll find there is the ability to search and view videos of talks at Google.

One of the best features of working at Google is the rich variety of talks that we can attend, both technical and general interest. Most of these are videotaped for later viewing. This has multiple benefits:

• In case of a scheduling conflict, Google employees may view talks at a later time (yes, some of us do have other things to do in the day).


• Talks are available for viewing by Google employees at other sites. This provides us with a much more cohesive intellectual culture than most global companies.


• When appropriate, speakers may opt to have their talks available on the World Wide Web. This provides a benefit to both viewers and speakers, since it allows speakers to reach a much broader audience, and it allows viewers to hear interesting talks without the need to be
  physically present.
  

The World Wide Web started out as a means for scientists to communicate among themselves. In the early days it provided a less formal and timely means of distributing information than archival refereed publications, and it's now routine for a scientist to have a home page from which they distribute their writings and thoughts. Moreover, it's also now commonplace to find a large fraction of current scientific literature through the web, both refereed and unrefereed. In fact, the situation has evolved to the point where scientists often consult the web for publications before going to a library.

Archival publications are but one means of communication that has typically been used by scientists. Another mode of communication that has a long history of use is the presentation of talks at meetings and during visits to other institutions. Oral presentations have historically been less formal, and allow the speaker to be more speculative and interactive.

In the last few years, several technological developments have made it possible to distribute high quality video of talks on the web in addition to written publications. This distribution of videos from talks holds the promise of changing the way that scientists think about communication. Imagine what lessons would be available to us if we had the ability to view lectures by Kepler, Einstein, Turing, Shannon, or von Neumann! Imagine also what it would be like to be able to watch and listen to selected talks from conferences that are across the world, without having to suffer the burden of traveling to the remote location. Such media are unlikely to ever completely supplant the richness of communication that arises from personal interaction in physical proximity, but it will probably still change scientific communication as much as email and the web have already.