A Panoramic View of WAW/WINE 07
The 5th Workshop on Algorithms and Models for the Web-Graph (WAW 07) was held in conjunction with the 3rd International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics (WINE 07) from December 11 to December 14, 2007 in picturesque La Jolla, California. The joint workshops brought together a broad range of researchers from academia and industry, including representatives from Yahoo! Research, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Yahoo! Researchers filled the program, authoring several papers and leading the organizing and program committees.
Research Fellow and VP Andrei Broder was on the organizing committee of WAW 07, with researchers Ravi Kumar and Kevin Lang on the program committee. Researchers Rica Gonen and Dave Pennock were on the program committee for WINE 07. A total of 15 authored papers by Yahoo! Researchers were published for both conferences.
A common theme was algorithms for Web applications, ranging from graph-theoretic algorithms for mining the link structure of the Web, to algorithms for Web search advertising.
One of the major highlights was a keynote address by Nobel Prize winning economist Ken Arrow, who laid out some of the major developments in economics research over the past century. Attracting a crowd that overfilled the room, Arrow humbly underplayed his own role in driving the field forward, and the crowd responded with tremendous enthusiasm in listening to such a legendary figure. A second keynote address by computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou was inspiring for researchers straddling the fields of economics and computer science. Papadimitriou eloquently described what is known -- and perhaps more importantly what is still yet unknown -- about the computational complexity of central economic problems like equilibrium finding, pricing, and resource allocation.
The keynotes weren’t the only attractions of the workshops. During breaks between talks, attendees spilled out onto the roof of the La Jolla Cove Suites overlooking the rocky Pacific coast to enjoy the majestic view.
