Thursday, April 9, 2009

ECIR 2009 in Toulouse


I've never attended the European Conference on Information Retireval before, but this year I flew to Toulouse for ECIR 2009. My continued reflection on the larger implications of the properties of the error produced by speech recognition systems finally yielded some fruit...but it is still only a small window on a larger story.

Larson M., Tsagkias E., He J., de Rijke M., Exploring the Global Semantic Impact of Speech Recognition Errors on Spoken Content Retrieval, 31st European Conference on Information Retrieval Conference (ECIR 2009).

Tsagkias E., Larson M., de Rijke M., Exploiting Surface Features for the Prediction of Podcast Preference, 31st European Conference on Information Retrieval Conference (ECIR 2009).

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Kill your blog?

A "rant" I sent to Wired in reaction to "Kill your Blog" (Wired Nov 2008 p. 27). It didn't get published there--it seemed only fitting that it should land here in the blogosphere:

"How did we come to so completely repress our dissatisfaction with mainstream search engines? You point a finger at blogging and bloggers, but the issues you raise could also be laid at the doorstep of Google. Dare to imagine a search engine that lets our voices be heard within the intimate internet communities important to us, a search engine that distills for us the pith of our posts, keeping pace with publication. My rant passed your magic 140 character Twitter limit in my second sentence--shouldn't internet search technology be addressing the challenge of making my opinion heard anyway?"