Jürgen Geck: Turning The Web Inside Out
About the speaker
Jürgen Geck is the chief travelling officer of Open-Xchange, a company that provides integrated tools for mail and collaboration to millions of users in Europe. He is responsible for continued development and communication of the company’s technology strategies. He brings a distinguished background in open source and technology management to Open-Xchange.
Before Jürgen Geck joined Open-Xchange, he spent 10 years with Suse Linux as Vice president Technology Partners and CTO. He built strong alliances with AMD, Fujitsu-Siemens-Computers, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Oracle and SAP and introduced in 2002 Suse's Technology Partner Program to provide a scalable offering for all Suse partners.
As CTO, Geck was instrumental in designing Suse's flagship product, Suse Linux Enterprise Server and its maintenance model, enabling the first enterprise Linux offering in the market. Geck is also one of the founders of Eclipse.org. Jürgen Geck holds a masters degree in production engineering from the University of Erlangen, Germany.
About the talk
While Social Networks have become the hype of the industry, and facebook.com has more than half of all the users on the net as registererd users (comscore.com and facebook.com) there is no easy, general method to transfer addresses, calendar availability or documents between two smartphones.
Enabling peers to communicate directly is a basic requirement to start a social internet.
Open source has shown success in standardizing the operating system layer. The same concepts can be applied to establish standards for data. Based on common conventions how to interpret specific tags software can interact on a much more powerful level than what is possible today.
Wolfgang Nejdl: Web of People -- Improving Search on the Web
About the speaker
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl (born 1960) has been full professor of computer science at the University of Hannover since 1995. He received his M.Sc. (1984) and Ph.D. degree (1988) at the Technical University of Vienna, was assistant professor in Vienna from 1988 to 1992, and associate professor at the RWTH Aachen from 1992 to 1995. He worked as visiting researcher / professor at Xerox PARC, Stanford University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, EPFL Lausanne, and at PUC Rio.
Prof. Nejdl heads the L3S Research Center as well as the Distributed Systems Institute / Knowledge Based Systems , and does research in the areas of search and information retrieval, information systems, semantic web technologies, peer-to-peer infrastructures, databases, technology-enhanced learning and artificial intelligence. Some recent projects in the L3S context include the PHAROS Integrated Project on audio-visual search, the OKKAM IP focusing on entities on the Web, the Digital Library EU project LiWA, coordinated by L3S, which investigates Web archive management and advanced search in such an archive, and the FET IP project LivingKnowledge, which is developing algorithms and methods to handle and exploit diversity, bias and opinion on the Web. Another new project, GLOCAL, focuses on event-based indexing of multimedia data on the web.
Wolfgang Nejdl published more than 240 scientific articles, as listed at DBLP, and has been program chair, program committee and editorial board member of numerous international conferences and journals, most recently including the role of PC chair for WWW'09 in Madrid, PC chair for WSDM'11 in HongKong, and general chair for ICDE'11 in Hannover, see also http://www.kbs.uni-hannover.de/~nejdl/
About the talk
More and more information is available on the Web, and the current search engines do a great job to make it accessible. Yet, optimizing for a large number of users, they usually provide good answers only to “most of us", and have yet to provide satisfying mechanisms to search for audiovisual content.
In this talk I will present ongoing work at L3S addressing these challenges. I will start by giving a brief overview of Web Science areas covered at L3S, and the main challenges we adress in these areas, with the Web of People as one important focal point of our research, as well as Web Information Management and Web Search.
In the second part of the talk, I will discuss search for audiovisual content, and how to make this content more accessible. As many of our algorithms focus on exploiting user generated information, I will discuss what kinds of tags are used for different resources and how they can help for search. Collaborative tagging has become an increasingly popular means for sharing and organizing Web resources, leading to a huge amount of user generated metadata. These tags represent different aspects of the resources they describe and it is not obvious whether and how these tags or subsets of them can be used for search. I will present an in-depth study of tagging behavior for different kinds of resources - Web pages, music, and images. I will also discuss how to enrich existing tags through machine learning methods, to provide indexing more appropriate to user search behavior.