KEYNOTE ABSTRACTS
Dr. Alfred Z. Spector
VP Research and Special Initiatives, Google, Inc.
“The Continuing Metamorphosis of the Web”
The invention of HTML and HTTP catalyzed a path of enormous innovation that was hard to foresee in the early 1990’s. The Web’s continuing metamorphosis has led to fantastically increased capabilities and economic value. It has catalyzed the creation of distributed systems orders of magnitude larger than any previously built, new programming and distribution models for computer applications, great advances in the fields of information retrieval, entirely new domains for theoretical computer science, and more. This greatly enhanced web is changing the entire environment and enabling some early research promises to become a reality for most Internet users. In this presentation, I will discuss such examples, and in particular, what happens when speech, image processing, human language translation, and mobility are woven into all we do. I will also extrapolate from some current research and advanced web technologies to paint a picture of the web five-to-ten years out. This should have implications for the computer science community, as well as the vast community that is leveraging the web for ever greater goals.
Dr. Pablo Rodriguez
Internet Scientific Director, Telefonica R&D
“Web Infrastructure for the 21st Century”
The Web success in leading the information technology revolution has relied on an enormous computing infrastructure. In recent years, both cloud computing as well as social networks are putting even more burden in such infrastructure. The cloud computing paradigm is creating a massive shift in computing – from PC-based applications to cloud-based applications. Cloud computing frees users from having to remember where the data resides, gives users access to information anywhere, and provides fast services through essentially infinite online computing. Social networks, on the other hand, emerge the social aspects of the Web where the social interactions put demands on Web applications, and in turn further demands in the Web's infrastructure.
The Internet, which was mostly developed for interactive applications between humans and computers, has struggled to handle the necessities of a Web designed around content. For instance, as Web content moves from one place to another, Web pointers are broken and so do search ranking algorithms. Similarly, content is often not where it should be when you need it and routers waste capacity copying the same content millions of times. As a result, we have seen the emergence of Internet systems that were not planned for from the beginning, e.g. Web Caching, Content Distribution Networks, or P2P networks.
In this talk I will discuss the challenges that the Web is posing in today's Internet infrastructure, and argue about various solutions to cope with them. In particular, I will argue how to re-think the Internet to do networking at the content/information layer, and the underlying architectural system design principles needed to guide the efficient engineering of new Web infrastructure services.
Dr. Ricardo Baeza-Yates
Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain
”Mining the Web 2.0 for Better Search”
There are several semantic sources that can be found in the Web that are either explicit, e.g. Wikipedia, or implicit, e.g. derived from Web usage data. Most of them are related to user generated content (UGC) or what is called today the Web 2.0. In this talk we show several applications of mining the wisdom of crowds behind UGC to improve search. We will show live demos to find relations in the Wikipedia or to improve image search as well as our current research in the topic. Our final goal is to produce a virtuous data feedback circuit to leverage the Web itself.
