ICEIS 2008: Final sprint and Ricardo Baeza-Yates

This is the final sprint for ICEIS. I have been mostly focusing on posters this morning. It his hard to pick one up. I would just say that there was some interesting work on personalized recommender systems—paper 219. But as I said, there were a bunch of interesting ones and quite a few interesting by-the-poster conversations. Actually, I am having a very interesting time after the mix of attendees’ profiles. The morning finally meandered into Ricardo Baeza-Yates’s keynote talk. After the initial technical problems—presentation mode of OpenOffice running on Ubuntu 8.0.4 got up just 75% of the slide area—they finally succeeded on getting something up and get the talk started. This was a pretty technical talk about Yahoo! research effort on caching to improve the performance and also help scalability and contain cost on the coming years. Besides several cache techniques, he also presented a bunch of possible paralyzation models based on document/term partitions. A thing he breezed over was the machine learning model for classifying queries. That surfaced several places, from predicting common and rare content, to frequent, unfrequent, and rare queries. I was glad that the technical problems were solve and we could enjoy it. And the conference is finally close. Next year, Milan.