The recently-launched Microsoft Academic Search, a product of Microsoft Research Asia, has made a bit of a splash as a potential competitor to Google Scholar. Although its coverage does not seem as detailed as Google Scholar quite yet, MS Academic Search has a number of additional features, such as author and conference pages, publication activity graphs, and the like. (It also has a really unwieldly, eight-syllable name; let me abbreviate to MSAS.)
The latest iteration of the NTCIR effort, NTCIR-8, has concluded. NTCIR is a collaborative information retrieval forum, focusing on tasks in East Asian languages (currently Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, plus English); it is otherwise known as “the Asian TREC”. The proceedings are available online.
I’ve just finished my CIKM 2010 reviewing assignments, and have come out of the process with a number of questions:
I was recently invited to contribute a short article to a special issue of the IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin on keyword search in databases. Since database keyword search is not an area I have worked on previously, I decided the most worthwhile contribution I could make was to survey evaluation practice in the area, and compare it to what is done in mainstream information retrieval.
I’m currently reading Nonsampling Error in Surveys, by Judith Lessler and William Kalsbeek (Wiley, 1992) for a project I’m working on. It is, for the most part, an informative but necessarily rather dry treatment of statistical questions in survey design and interpretation. The segue at the end of Chapter 10 (p276), however, reads:
If the pancake does not decide to enter the Olympics as a disk, causing the athletes to fall far below records set previously by Russian athletes because of the sticky maple syrup, we will tell you next, dear reader, about measurement variability.
This is even referenced in the index under “pancake(s)”. I wonder whether this was intended as an Easter egg for the reader, or to test the attention of the editor…
We’ve received a couple of requests for more time to complete EVIA submissions, and so have extended the deadline to 23:59, GMT-12 on Friday, 2nd April. (Yes, I realize that the consequent does not necessarily follow from the antecedent, but we’re just naturally accommodating.) Note the timezone: the submission system is open as long as it is 2nd April anywhere in the world.
One of the most important emerging fields within information retrieval is that of complaining about SIGIR. It is a field of work with a very wide participation. Researchers complain about the upcoming deadline in January; reviewers complain about their reviewing load and the quality of submissions during February; the senior program committee complains about reviewers, the review process, the acceptance criteria, and each other throughout March; accepted and rejected authors alike complain about the quality of reviews; conference attendees complain about the quality of the accepted pages; all of these complaints are rehearsed at the conference business meeting; and bloggers complain about all the complaining.
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I’ve recently developed a morbid interest in the literature of financial disasters. In this vein, I’ve just finished reading Kindleberger et al., Manias, Panic, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises — an interesting book, but remarkable for the confused way the writing is organized, with constant re-iterations, digressions, and non-sequiturs, as if someone had taken several working revisions, cut them up, dropped them on the floor, and then re-assembled the pieces without too much care for their coherence.
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Bertrand Russell’s practically-minded grandmother used to disapprovingly refer to his studies of higher mathematics as “this life you are leading”. I have my own bookish degeneracy, namely, books. When at work I think with guilty pleasure of getting home, getting into my armchair, and reading. Besides reading, my preferred pastime is — being at work. Staying home, on holiday, renders me liable to impressment into the sort of extended, aimless social activity that leaves me feeling vaguely psychopathic. My partner and I are in the happy equilibrium of being able to return home, me from work, her from the beach, and commiserating each the other on the rigours endured. My officemate Anh artfully combines the two activities; he feigns work so as to get time away from his family at the weekend, in the office, reading novels.
I am in the habit of summarizing interesting articles as draft postings on my blog, in order to get the content of the article into my head. Generally, I don’t go on to fully polish and publish the summarizing post. But if I absent-mindedly hit the “publish” button when what I want is “save draft”, then I do end up publishing the post, without any polishing. This happened to my notes on a Wired article on the rise and rise of the placebo effect. It’s gone from my blog now, but if you subscribe via a reader, the disjointed sentences likely ended up in your in tray. Apologies.
