Category: Expert Search

Last year, in Seattle, Jon Kleinberg gave a keynote speech about social networks, incentives and search. In social networks, it is not about what you do, how much you do, or where you're from, it is about who you know. To celebrate SIGIR's 30th anniversary, we analysed all SIGIR proceedings and built a social network in which SIGIR authors are the nodes and edges are added between nodes if two authors co-authored a SIGIR paper together. The author that is most central in the network, is the one that has the shortest average distance to all other authors, where the distance is 1 if two authors wrote a SIGIR paper together, it is 2 if the first author wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with the second author, etc. It turns out that the center of the SIGIR universe is Wensi Xi from Google. Congrats Wensi! More info on: Search demo (See the Oracle of Xi)

SIGIR will have its 30th conference this year. To celebrate this, we created some fun search applications that search the abstracts of 30 years of SIGIR proceedings at: http://www.sigir2007.org/search.

Enter your favorite IR topic to search in the abstracts of 30 years of SIGIR and find experts, periods and geographical locations associated with your search. The “mystery link” will be revealed at the conference in Amsterdam.