Success at CIKM 2007

As a major sponsor of the five-day event, Yahoo! Research had an unmatched presence at CIKM 07, with significant contributions by its researchers. Head of Yahoo! Research Prabhakar Raghavan kicked things off with the first keynote of the conference, “Web Search: From Information Retrieval to Microeconomic Modeling,” which attracted over 150 attendees. Yahoo! Research Director Ricardo Baeza-Yates, was program chair, and, together with researcher Sihem Amer-Yahia, led a tutorial on XML query processing and data management.

This year’s conference displayed a greater diversity of focus on problems of interest to Yahoo! Research and showed a more significant industry research presence. Some of the themes included:

• Entity search and social search emerging as new information retrieval (IR) topics
• Local query expansion methods continue to improve, showing promising results, a trend that was strong at SIGIR 07 and continued at CIKM 07
• The utilization of Wikipedia as an open-domain resource for search – some papers map Wikipedia information to existing ontologies, or enrich the information that already exists (best paper winner example: “Autonomously Semantifying Wikipedia by Fei Wu and Daniel S. Weld)

Yahoo! Research had 4 accepted papers and 3 short papers. Researchers Benjamin Piwowarsky and Hugo Zaragoza presented an extremely well-received paper, “Predictive User Click Models Based on Clickthrough History,” that focused on predicting the browsing behaviors of users. Other papers focused on contextual advertising, social search and many other interesting IR topics to explore.

Attendees were also interested in exploring the location of the conference as well as the local cuisine. Highlights included the “Monument of Discovery,” a boat shaped monument depicting several famous explorers such as Portugal’s most famous -- Vasco Da Gama.