Abstract:

In the past decade, Web search engines have evolved from a first generation
based on classic Information Retrieval (IR) scaled up to web size and
supporting only informational queries, to a second generation supporting
navigational queries using web specific information (primarily link
analysis), and then to a third generation enabling transactional and other
"semantic" queries based on a variety of technologies aimed to directly
satisfy the unexpressed "user intent." What is coming next? In this talk, we
argue for the trend towards context driven Information Supply, that is, the
goal of Web IR will widen to include the supply of relevant information
without requiring the user to make an explicit query. The information supply
concept greatly precedes information retrieval. (Newspapers, or even the
"Acta Diurna" of ancient Rome.) What is new in the web framework, is the
ability to supply relevant information specific to a given activity and a
given user, while the activity is being performed. A prime example is the
matching of ads to content being read, however the information supply
paradigm is starting to appear in other contexts such as social networks,
e-commerce, browsers, and others. 

Biography:
 
Andrei Broder has recently joined Yahoo! as a Yahoo! Research Fellow and
Vice President of Emerging Search Technology. Previously he was an IBM
Distinguished Engineer and the CTO of the Institute for Search and Text
Analysis in IBM Research. From 1999 until 2002 he was VP for Research and
Chief Scientist at the AltaVista Company. Before that he has been a senior
member of the research staff at Compaq's Systems Research Center in Palo
Alto. He was graduated Summa cum Laude from Technion, the Israeli Institute
of Technology, and obtained his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at
Stanford University under Don Knuth. His main research interests are the
design, analysis, and implementation of randomized algorithms and supporting
data structures, in particular in the context of web-scale information
retrieval and applications. Broder is co-winner of the Best Paper award at
WWW6 and at WWW9. He has published more than seventy papers and was awarded
twenty patents. He is an IEEE fellow and serves as chair of the IEEE
Technical Committee on Mathematical Foundations of Computing.