PersDB 2011

Abstract. Yahoo! has been using algorithmic techniques to rank articles on portal pages with great success. In this talk, I'll present an overview of the approach, which seeks to combine data-driven algorithms and inferred user interests with editorial judgment and declared user interests. I will present some of the algorithms used, and discuss how the framework allows us to address a broad range of objectives including personalization, discovery, and multi-objective optimization in a principled way.

Raghu Ramakrishnan is Chief Scientist for Search and Cloud Platforms at Yahoo!, and is a Yahoo! Fellow, heading the Web Information Management research group. His work in database systems, with a focus on data mining, query optimization, and web-scale data management, has influenced query optimization in commercial database systems and the design of window functions in SQL:1999. His paper on the Birch clustering algorithm received the SIGMOD 10-Year Test-of-Time award, and he has written the widely-used text "Database Management Systems" (with Johannes Gehrke). His current research interests are in cloud computing, content optimization, and the development of a "web of concepts" that indexes all information on the web in semantically rich terms. Ramakrishnan has received several awards, including the ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, a Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE. Ramakrishnan is on the Board of Directors of ACM SIGKDD, and is a past Chair of ACM SIGMOD and member of the Board of Trustees of the VLDB Endowment. He was Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was founder and CTO of QUIQ, a company that pioneered crowd-sourcing, specifically question-answering communities, powering Ask Jeeves' AnswerPoint as well as customer-support for companies such as Compaq.

Abstract. Social sites have become an important component of the web boasting millions of users. Social sites have changed how people use the Web transforming them from passive consumers to active contributors. Users provide comments, videos, opinions, their location and status, and a wealth of other information of different significance and usefulness. Social activity and online presence become increasingly more important. In fact, many real-life activities can now be accomplished online, for example, looking for a good restaurant or buying a book. The social phenomenon has been also boosted by portable devices that allow people to be online from anywhere and anytime. Given this context, the purpose of the panel is to pinpoint the huge opportunities that open up but also to reveal great challenges that arise and shed light to the several controversies around social data and apps both from a researcher's and a user's perspective.