[Colloq] Colloquium - Eugene Agichtein - Emory University - Monday, March 9, 10am

[Rachel Kalweit]

The College of Computer and Information Science Colloquium presents:

Eugene Agichtein - Emory University
Monday, March 9
10:00 am
366 West Village H

Title: Modeling User Interactions in Web Search and Social Media

Abstract: 
Social media is transforming online information access in at 
least three ways: as a prominent part of the web information 
ecosystem, as a platform for information seeking, and as a 
planet-scale experimental infrastructure for studying human 
behavior. In particular, Collaborative Question Answering (CQA) 
model has emerged as a potential alternative to web search: 
participants post questions and answers, and rate and evaluate 
each others contributions. The resulting archives of both the 
content and the context of the interactions provide a testbed 
for development of novel natural language processing, text 
mining, and information retrieval techniques. I will describe 
our new techniques for mining social media for tasks such as 
estimating content quality, contributor authority, and information 
seeker intent and satisfaction with the results. While the primary 
goal of this work is improving information access, I will also 
describe, if time permits, connections to medical informatics and 
public health research.

Biosketch:
Dr. Eugene Agichtein is an Assistant Professor in the 
Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Emory 
University where he directs the Intelligent Information
Access laboratory. Eugene’s research interests are in 
information retrieval, user modeling, text and data mining, 
and natural language processing. He received a Ph.D. from 
Columbia University in 2005, and a B.S. in Engineering from 
the Cooper Union in 1998.  Previously, he was a Postdoctoral 
Researcher in the  Text Mining, Search, and Navigation group 
at Microsoft Research, and a consulting researcher at Yahoo! 
Research. Eugene's work was recognized with a Microsoft 
”Beyond Search” award, Yahoo! faculty research award, and 
a SIGMOD 2006 best paper award.  

http://www.mathcs.emory.edu/~eugene/

Host: Jay Aslam