| Dr. Jim Jansen |
Pennsylvania State University,
USA |
Jim Jansen
(ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/) is working on developing robust methods of
data analysis that support the paradigm of log content as temporal information
streams and provide predictive behaviors with reduced computational costs given
the volume of data, acceptance of richer range of characteristics, and enhanced
predictability modeling. Talk title: "Moving from
Description to Prediction for Information Searching."
|
| Dr. Fabrizio Silvestri |
ISTI-CNR, Italy |
Fabrizio Silvestri (pomino.isti.cnr.it/~silvestr/) has been
using query logs, in the past, mainly to improve efficiency of Web IR systems.
He has been involved in designing a new caching policy (SDC) tailored on Web
Search Engines workload. He has also designed a data partitioning and query
routing technique for better exploiting the computing capacity of Web IR
systems running large clusters of PCs. Recently he has started to work on using
query logs to produce query shortcuts, i.e. suggesting queries that will reduce
the length of user query sessions.
|
| Dr. Lynn Connaway |
OCLC, USA |
Lynn Connaway (www.oclc.org/research/staff/connaway.htm)
has analysed transaction logs to identify discovery and access patterns
demonstrated by users accessing the same database (WorldCat) through two
different interfaces - First Search and WorldCat.org. WorldCat is the world's
largest and most comprehensive bibliographic database, with 125 million records
that represent more than 1.3 billion individual items in libraries worldwide.
WorldCat is the underlying database for both FirstSearch and WorldCat.org.
FirstSearch provides electronic access to dozens of databases and more than 10
million full-text and full-image articles while WorldCat.org is the web-based
interface for WorldCat. The discussion will include an analysis of behaviors
and patterns revealed in FirstSearch and WorldCat.org search logs as well as a
comparison of the different search behaviors demonstrated in the two different
interfaces of the data base. The log analyses suggest that users exhibit
different behaviors and achieve different levels of success when using the
different interfaces. The findings provide evidence-based information that can
be used for the design and management of discovery and access tools. Talk
title: "Following the Trail of WorldCat Users."
|
| Prof. Bettina Berendt |
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium |
Bettina Berendt (www.cs.kuleuven.be/~berendt) is a professor in
the department of computer science at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.
She obtained her habilitation in information systems from Humboldt University
Berlin, Germany, and her Ph.D. in computer science/cognitive science from the
University of Hamburg. Her research interests include Web and Social-Web
mining, digital libraries, personalization and privacy, and information
visualization. Bettina Berendt's work on Web log analysis has focussed on
determining user interests by service-based log analysis, query mining, mining
with background knowledge, and on investigating the impact of linguistic and
cultural diversity on Web usage behaviour.
|
| Prof. Nigel Ford |
University of Sheffield, UK |
Nigel Ford's (www.shef.ac.uk/is/staff/ford.html) main research
focus is on the psychology of the web searcher, and he has conducted a number
of studies of web searching to support learning. This work has entailed the
analysis of query logs from searchers for whom personal data are known, such as
gender, age, cognitive style, and study approach. He is particularly interested
in using log analysis to identify associations between human individual
differences, search patterns and effectiveness, the ultimate goal of which is
to build user models capable of driving adaptive behaviour in search tools.
Talk title: "Query log analysis and individual differences."
|
| Dr. Thomas Mandl |
University of Hildesheim, Germany |
Thomas Mandl (www.uni-hildesheim.de/~mandl/) is organiser of a
large-scale evaluation campaign called LogCLEF which is being run as part of
the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2009. He is interested in user
behavior in information retrieval systems and social networks. The focus lies
on user behavior in multilingual contexts. For future research, the relation
between user studies and log analysis might open new perspectives. Thomas Mandl
worked as a research assistant at the Social Science Information Centre in
Bonn, Germany and as assistant professor at the University of Hildesheim in
Germany where he is teaching in the programme International Information
Management. He received a doctorate degree and a post doctoral degree
(Habilitation) from the University of Hildesheim. His research interests
include information retrieval, human-computer interaction and
internationalization of information technology. Talk title "Query
classification in Logfile-Analysis: Evaluation issues and user
satisfaction."
|
| Dr. Filip Radlinski |
Microsoft Research (Cambridge, UK) |
Filip Radlinski (research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/filiprad/)
is an applied researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK where he is in
the Information Retrieval group and also works for Live Search. He completed
his PhD in Computer Science on learning to rank from implicit feedback at
Cornell University in 2008, advised by Thorsten Joachims. His research
interests focus on the practical and theoretical challenges of learning to
rank, and evaluating online ranked retrieval systems, using behavioural data
recorded as people use such systems. He has used search log files to learn
improved ranking functions, as well as to perform interactive evaluation of
search systems. In particular, he has recently studied the relative power of
various metrics that can be derived from log files for evaluating the
differences between ranking functions.
|
| Prof. Mark Levene |
Birbeck, University of London, UK |
The main focus of recent work in this area by Mark Levene
(www.dcs.bbk.ac.uk/~mark) has been on predicting users' navigation behaviour
from server logs. Regarding query log analysis Mark has been working on query
classification and applying this to topic specific analysis of query logs and
for improving users' search experience.
|
| Dr. Udo Kruschwitz |
University of Essex, UK |
The log analysis research by Udo Kruschwitz
(cswww.essex.ac.uk/staff/udo/) and colleagues focuses primarily on intranet
collections. They have collected a query corpus of more than half a million
queries submitted to a local search engine which is now being used as part of
the AutoAdapt project to build adaptive domain models. They have also recently
obtained funding for another KTP project with a major internet recruitment
service where we will be analyzing substantial log files related to job search.
Talk title: "Steps towards adaptive intranet search."
|
| Dr. Vanessa Murdock |
Yahoo! (Barcelona, Spain) |
Vanessa Murdock (research.yahoo.com/Vanessa_Murdock) is a
research scientist at Yahoo! Research in Barcelona. Her work focuses on
leveraging click data to improve the placement of sponsored search results and
contextual advertising, and images. She received her PhD in 2006 from the
University of Massachusetts where she worked with Bruce Croft at the Center for
Intelligent Information Retrieval.
|
| Dr. Giorgio Di Nunzio |
University of Padoa, Italy |
Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio is co-organiser of the LogCLEF
evaluation task which is being run as part of the Cross Language Evaluation
Forum (CLEF) 2009. His main interest in the field of log analysis concerns
knowledge extraction from different sources of data: Web logs, search logs and
user studies, He has been involved in the analysis of the logs of The European
Library (http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org/) since 2006.
(ims.dei.unipd.it/websites/archive/ims2009/members/dinunzio.html)
|
| Dr. Dhavval Thakker |
Press Association, UK |
Dhavval Thakker (http://jaala.co.uk/) is a KTP Research
Associate working on “Intelligent Image Search Engine” project in
partnership with Press Association Images and Nottingham Trent University. He
received a doctorate degree from the Nottingham Trent University and an MSc
degree from the Brunel University, UK. His present research interests are in
the areas of Natural Language Processing & Semantic Web and their
application in the image annotation and retrieval processes. In the query log
analysis domain, he is mainly interested in search patterns and user behaviours
in image search engine systems.
|