Keynote Talks
Learning in Times of Abundance: The Snowflake Effect --slide
Prof. Erik Duval, Dept. Computerwetenschappen, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Location: Generali Hall – August 19, 9.30 - 10.15
Exploiting User Generated Content to Improve Search --slide
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl, Dept. Computer Science, University of Hannover
Location: Generali Hall – August 20, 9.00 - 9.45
Learning in Times of Abundance: The Snowflake Effect
Abstract: In this keynote, Prof. Erik Duval will discuss how we are evolving towards a global open learning infrastructure with an abundance of learning resources. This is the result of more than 15 years of work on technical standards and interoperability. Abundance is certainly a better situation than the earlier scarcity of resources and creates many opportunities for innovation. However, teachers and learners can be a bit overwhelmed by the large numbers and wide variety of resources and we need to help them to focus on what is relevant to them. The Snowflake Effect is our approach of dealing with this issue, based on massive hyper-personalization.
Erik Duval is a professor of computer science at the Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His research interests include:
metadata, learning objects, a global learning infrastructure based on
open standards and mass personalization ("The Snowflake Effect").
Prof. Duval teaches courses on Human-Computer Interaction, Multimedia
and Problem Solving and Design. Erik serves as the president of the
ARIADNE Foundation, chairs the IEEE LTSC working group on Learning
Object Metadata and is a fellow of the AACE. He co-founded two spin-
offs that apply research results for access to music and scientific
output. See also http://erikduval.wordpress.com/ and
http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/~erikd/
Exploiting User Generated Content to Improve Search
Abstract: More and more information is available on the Web, and the current search engines do a great job to make it accessible. Yet, optimizing for a large number of users, they usually provide good answers only to "most of us", and have yet to provide satisfying mechanisms to search for audiovisual content. In this talk Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl will present some ongoing work at L3S addressing these challenges, done in the context of several European Union funded projects on personal information management and web search.
Regarding search for audiovisual content, I will focus on exploiting user generated information, and discuss what kinds of tags are used for different resources and how they can help for search. Collaborative tagging has become an increasingly popular means for sharing and organizing Web resources, leading to a huge amount of user generated metadata. These tags represent different aspects of the resources they describe and it is not obvious whether and how these tags or subsets of them can be used for search. I will present an in-depth study of tagging behavior for different kinds of resources - Web pages, music, and images. The results are promising and provide more insight into both the use of different kinds of tags for improving search and possible extensions of tagging systems to support the creation of potentially search-relevant tags.
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Nejdl (born 1960) has been full professor of
computer science at the University of Hannover since 1995. He
received his M.Sc. (1984) and Ph.D. degree (1988) at the Technical
University of Vienna, was assistant professor in Vienna from 1988 to
1992, and associate professor at the RWTH Aachen from 1992 to 1995.
He worked as visiting researcher / professor at Xerox PARC, Stanford
University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, EPFL Lausanne,
and at PUC Rio.
Prof. Nejdl heads the Distributed Systems Institute / Knowledge Based Systems (http://www.kbs.uni-hannover.de/) as well as the L3S Research Center (http://www.l3s.de/), and does research in the areas of search and information retrieval, semantic web technologies, peer-to-peer information systems, technology-enhanced learning, databases and artificial intelligence. Relevant projects in the L3S context include the PHAROS Integrated Project on audio-visual search, the OKKAM IP focusing on entities on the Web, the Digital Library EU project LiWA, coordinated by L3S, which investigates Web archive management and advanced search in such an archive, and the FET IP project LivingKnowledge, which is developing algorithms and methods to handle and exploit diversity, bias and opinion on the Web.
Wolfgang Nejdl published more than 200 scientific articles, as listed at DBLP, and has been program chair, program committee and editorial board member of numerous international conferences and journals, see also http://www.kbs.uni-hannover.de/~nejdl/
