SALS-SIG Research Seminar

Have you made a difference today?

Abstract:

What was until recently only a fanciful thought is turning out to be a wonderful reality: With the dramatic growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web, more and more powerful possibilities of intentional and unintentional collaboration among the peoples and machines of this world are emerging. Some tasks such as computing the next prime number in a distributed fashion on thousands of PCs still require deliberate effort and organization. Others are largely automatic, even subconscious. When you put up information on any Web site, or even just casually search or browse the Web, your actions make a real difference and enrich the experience of all future users. Alexa, Alta Vista, Amazon, and Direct Hit, to name just a few well-known companies, are already making use of you, the user, to improve every future user's experience in some specific ways.

Infoseek (now a part of the Go Network, www.go.com) is among the leaders in applying these ideas to improve the user experience. Numerous aspects of the content and the format of our sites, e.g., many of their search features and their directory features, are based on what users are expressing as their needs in a variety of ways. The new Go Network portal is claimed to be the first portal built from the ground up that aims to fulfill user needs best. Its goal is to give users control while making their lives easier in myriad ways.

In this talk, I will provide an early evaluation of our successes and failures. I will also discuss some of the underlying technologies paying the most dividends as well as some of their limitations. Finally, I will show that the answer to the key question is indeed, yes, you have made a difference today.

Biography:

Shyam Kapur is a Staff Scientist at Infoseek Corporation in Sunnyvale, California, working, in part, on some of the developments that will be discussed in his talk. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1992 with a dissertation on machine learning of natural and formal languages. During his subsequent two year stay as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at University of Pennsylvania, he continued his doctoral work by building cognitively-plausible computational models for natural language learning and processing. In early 1994, Shyam moved to Australia to take up a lecturership at the Townsville campus of James Cook University. Attracted to the many possibilities the advent of the World Wide Web opened up, he built toolkits for sophisticated uses of the Web for teaching. He proposed methods for more effective management of information on the Web, from the points of the view of both its creators and users. He also designed, initiated and taught a new, up-to-date IT curriculum on the new campus in Cairns.

Enquiries: sals@mri.mq.edu.au