Djoerd Hiemstra’s home page

Excellent photos by Sander Bockting

Rene van Erk is member of the European management team of Wolters Kluwer where he is responsible for all Product - and Business Development. In this role, his key responsibility is to optimize the WK portfolio for maximum growth, meaning: a) M&A focus: Responsible for identifying acquisition opportunities with a good strategic portfolio b) Leading Innovation: Overall responsible for Product Development & Product Management moving WK from content provider to information solutions provider c) Leading our Online and Software Businesses: Wolters Kluwer currently owns around 30 Software Development Companies and leading Online properties across Europe. Rene will talk about: Communities and Workflow: Driving Information Consumption

More info at: DIR 2009

The 9th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR) will take place at the University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands, on February 2-3, 2009. The workshop is organised under the auspices of the Working Community on Information Sciences (WGI) and the School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS). The workshop is sponsored by NWO, CTIT and the University of Twente.

Keynote Speaker: prof. Gerhard Weikum (MPII, Saarbruecken, Germany) Gerhard Weikum is Research Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) in Saarbruecken, Germany, where he is leading the department on databases and information systems. Prof. Weikum is ACM fellow and a renowned expert in the field of Databases. He received the VLDB 10-Year Achievement Award in 2002. Since then, he focused on several information retrieval problems such as peer-to-peer search, search efficiency, and database and search integration, resulting in for instance 6 full papers at the last SIGIR conferences.

Due to the cooperation between SIKS, SIKS-members can participate without paying entrance fee. Especially PhD-students working on the SIKS-focus “Web based Information Systems” and “Data management, Storage and Retrieval” are strongly encouraged to participate. There is a limited number of registrations for SIKS members. Registrations will be honored in a first come-first serve manner.

Participants of DIR are invited to the Annual Meeting of the Werkgemeenschap Informatieschap which is directly following DIR on Tuesday.

Information Retrieval is the discipline that studies computer-based search tools. Many applications that handle information on the internet would be completely inadequate without the support of information retrieval technology. How would we manage our email without spam filtering? How would we find information on the world wide web if there were no web search engines? The rise of web search engines has been one of the major success stories in computer science of the last decade: Internet and search companies like Google and Yahoo are now among the world’s most influential information technology companies.

Today, search technology is provided and developed by major search providers like Google and Yahoo, and by small specialized companies with specialized staff. But as search technology matures, it will have to be available to non-expert application developers as well. A major obstacle to achieve this, is the lack of theories and high-level abstractions of search systems and the lack of declarative query languages. Another obstacle is the lack of methods to handle non-textual data, such as images, audio and video. Several projects of the Database Group of the University of Twente try to solve these problems for application areas such as Entity Search, Expert Search, Video Search, and Distributed Search. The models and approaches that are developed in these projects are evaluated on large scale, realistic testbeds, and implemented in the group’s open source search system PF/Tijah, a search system that combines keyword queries with structured queries on XML databases. The research contributes to the several courses in the university’s graduate programs, for instance Information Retrieval, and XML & Databases 1 and XML & Databases 2.

All groups have now been assigned a supervisor, see under “Messages/groups” on TeleTOP. The deadline for the project plan is 30 October. Make sure you have talked with your supervisor at least twice before you submit your plan. Send him an email to make an appointment.

Opinion Mining and Multimedia Information Retrieval

Who: Thijs Westerveld (TeezIR)
When: Wednesday, October 1, 2008, 13.45-15.30 h., room HO-3136
What: Opinion Mining and Multimedia Information Retrieval

Thijs Westerveld has over 10 years of experience in various areas of information retrieval, mostly in an academic setting. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the Human Media Interaction group at the University of Twente in 2004, on the use of generative probabilistic models for multimedia retrieval. Thijs has worked on numerous national and European projects in the areas of information retrieval and multimedia retrieval, and published in international journals and conferences in the field. Thijs currently works at TeezIR Search Solutions in Utrecht.

To give you the opportunity to visit Medialogy on October 8, there will be no lectures Advanced Database Systems and Information Retrieval on that day. Medialogy is s symposium about media and ICT organized by Inter-Actief and other Computer Science Student Organizations. The lectures will be moved to another time and place to be announced later.

We have collected three examples of reports submitted for the course Information Retrieval in earlier years. These are reports we found particularly good. To wet your appetite, we have collected here versions that have been further developed into papers for workshops/conferences. Yes, that’s possible in this course! All links point to the faculty’s ePrints-service and are clickable, certainly if you approach them from a machine in the UT-domain (please report if they don’t work).

1. Bockting, S. and Ooms, M.J. and Hiemstra, D. and van der Vet, P.E. and Huibers, T.W.C. (2008) Evaluating Relevance Feedback: An Image Retrieval Interface for Children. In: Proceedings of the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop, 14-15 Apr 2008, Maastricht. pp. 15-20. University of Maastricht. ISBN 978-90-5681-282-9
2. Ben Moussa, M. and Pasch, M. and Hiemstra, D. and van der Vet, P.E. and Huibers, T.W.C. (2007) The Potential of User Feedback Through the Iterative Refining of Queries in an Image Retrieval System. In: Adaptive Multimedia Retrieval: User, Context and Feedback, 27-28 July 2006, Geneva, Switzerland. pp. 258-268. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4398. Springer Verlag. ISSN 0302-9743 ISBN 978-3-540-71544-3
3. Hoekstra, A.H. and Hiemstra, D. and van der Vet, P.E. and Huibers, T.W.C. (2006) Question Answering for Dutch: Simple does it. In: Proceedings of the 18th BeNeLux Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC), 5-6 Oct 2006, Namur, Belgium. BNVKI. ISSN 1568-7805

More info on TeleTOP.

The DB Colloquium of Tuesday 29 January, 14:00 h.-15:00 h. in ZI-3126 consists of two small presentations.

Comprehending historical election programs using XML and XRPC

by Douwe van der Meij

Party programs for elections can be incomprehensible, not to mention the comparison of current party programs to that of a decade ago. This paper focusses on a way to compre- hend the latter. It shows how to use xml to store election programs and to query those. This paper also comes with a proof of concept (PoC). In retrospect we look at this PoC, and we discuss the design choices made.

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Boeken zonder leeftijdscategorie sneller vinden

by Wout Maaskant

In dit onderzoek is een systeem ontwikkeld waarmee gebruikers sneller boeken waar geen leeftijdscategorie aan is toegekend kunnen vinden in een bol.com-corpus, door gebruik te maken van eigenschappen van vergelijkbare boeken waar wel een leeftijdscategorie aan is toegekend. De gelijkenis tussen boeken wordt bepaald met behulp van het vector space model.

The IR Projects groups are assigned to the following supervisors. We
scheduled an intake meeting for every group. See below.

Group A: Lucassen, T. and Nijkamp, B.
Supervisor: Djoerd Hiemstra
Intake: Wed 14 Nov. 13.45 u. - 14.15 u. room 3031

Group B: Alofs, T. and Niesink, L.D.J.
Supervisor: Theo Huibers
Intake: Wed 14 Nov. 13.45 u. - 14.15 u. room 2122

Group C: Logtenberg, J.D. and Vliet, W.M. van
Supervisor: Dolf Trieschnigg
Intake: Wed 14 Nov. 13.45 u. - 14.15 u. room 2063

Group D: Dehling, E.E. and Wal, T. van der
Supervisor: Paul van der Vet
Intake: Wed 14 Nov. 13.45 u. - 14.45 u. room 2122

Group E: Klaas, M.H.J. and Maaskant, W.J.
Supervisor: Djoerd Hiemstra
Intake: Wed 14 Nov. 14.15 u. - 14.45 u. room 3031

Group F: and Diephuis, M. and Kanis, Z.
Supervisor: Theo Huibers
Intake: Wed 14 Nov. 14.15 u. - 14.45 u. room 2122

Group G: Pothoven, T. and Sikkema, N.
Supervisor: Dolf Trieschnigg
Intake: Wed 14 Nov. 14.15 u. - 14.45 u. room 2063

Group H: Hofwegen, M.F. van and Sanderman, R.
Supervisor: Paul van der Vet
Intake: Wed 14 Nov. 14.15 u. - 14.45 u. room 2122

Group I: Toure, Y.C. and Weele, J.H.D. ter
Supervisor: Dolf Trieschnigg
Intake: to be scheduled