FIRE Seminar Program Spring 2012 (Updated Mayr 14, 2012 - KJ)

Session time on indicated Fridays 12.15 - 15.00 (or shorter, or longer), location: seminar room Pinni A 4086.

Proposals for talks are welcome - as well as proposals for session day modifications.

January 20 

• Katriina Saarinen & Pertti Vakkari: "A sign of a good book. Readers' means of accessing fiction in a public library"
  
• Feza Baskaya & al: "Time Factors Drive Interaction: Simulating Sessions in Diverse Searching Environments"

February 24 

• Ari Pirkola: "A Web Browsing System for Retrieving Scholarly Pages"
  
• Suvi Oksanen & Pertti Vakkari: " In search of a good novel, neither reading activity nor querying help, but examining search results" 
•  Kal Jarvelin: Report from SWIRL II  

March 23 

• Tomi Heimonen: "Longitudinal Study of a Clustering Mobile Web Search Interface" 
  
• Yury Logachev: "Optimizing Parameters of the Expected Reciprocal Rank" Abstract: There are several popular IR metrics based on an underlying user model. Most of them are parameterized. Usually parameters of these metrics are chosen on the basis of general considerations and not validated by experiments with real users. Particularly, the parameters of the Expected Reciprocal Rank measure are the normalized parameters of the DCG metric, and the latter are chosen in an ad-hoc manner. We suggest two approaches for adjusting parameters of the ERR model by analyzing real users behaviour: one based on a controlled experiment and another relying on search log analysis. We show that our approaches generate parameters that are largely different from the commonly used parameters of the ERR model.
• Nicola Ferro and Gianmaria Silvello (U Padova, Italy): “Evaluation Infrastructures: Experimentation, Visualization and... Simulation?” – Presented by Nicola. Abstract: The talk will discuss what the role of an evaluation infrastructure can be for supporting large-scale evaluation campaigns, what are the challenges it has to face, what can be its impact on experimental evaluation. It will then discuss ongoing and future perspectives such as the exploitation of visual analytics for understanding experimental results and how to support simulation as a bridge between laboratory style evaluation and user-centered evaluation.

April 20 

• Dr Veslava Osinska (Nicolaus Copernicus U, Poland)): "Classification Map as an Information Retrieval Interface".       Abstract: We have mapped the document collection of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) digital library to a sphere surface. To overcome the incorrectness of linear measures in indexes distances we calculated similarity matrix of themes and multidimensional scaling coordinates. The results show that space distances between class nodes accurately correspond with the thematic proximities. Documents mapped into a sphere surface were distributed around the classification nodes in proper locations. The proposed method of classification scheme visualization is suitable to reach nonlinearity in topic mapping of scholar resources. This property allows to accumulate much more classification nodes. The symmetry of a sphere favours a new subclasses and sublevels of classification trees uniform visualization. This method may be useful for the visual analysis of Computer Science and Engineering development being grown instantly. Visualization tools more recently exploited to retrieve information. Output visualization maps were tested as information retrieval (IR) interface. Input parameters controlled by IR results were tested and this way the most effective were selected. Possible feedback between visualization/retrieval system and user search need is the main advantage of the application.
• Kimmo Kettunen and Paavo Arvola. "Generating Variant Keyword Forms for a Morphologically Complex Language Leads to Successful Information Retrieval with Finnish".
  

May 25 

• SWIRL'12 - Frontiers, Challenges, and Opportunities for Information Retrieval. Discussion, for materials, see http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/swirl12/ .