Djoerd Hiemstra’s home page

Everyone, please stand on the castle’s axis steps…

Excellent photos by Sander Bockting

The participants of the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop in Maastricht smile for a team photo: With organiser Ed Hoenkamp left in the middle, and Netherlands most famous IR researcher Keith van Rijsbergen right in the back.

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Great news: Yesterday, Pavel Serdyukov won the best student paper award at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) in Glasgow for his paper Modeling documents as mixtures of persons for expert finding. The award includes a check of $ 1200 sponsored by Yahoo.

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I enjoyed giving the advanced language modeling tutorial at the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR). The slides are now availble for download below.

[download pdf]

The goal of the Dagstuhl seminar on Ranked XML Querying is to bring together researchers and practitioners from the database (DB), the information retrieval (IR) and the web/applications communities, and create an environment where the distinct communities collaboratively work on understanding the similarities and differences between their various approaches for querying XML data with heterogeneous structure and content, and benefit from each other’s experiences.

The workshop was attended by 27 people from three different research communities: database systems (DB), information retrieval (IR), and Web. The seminar title was interpreted in an IR-style „andish“ sense (it covered also subsets of {Ranking, XML, Querying}, with larger sets being favored) rather than the DB-style strictly conjunctive manner. So in essence, the seminar really addressed the integration of DB and IR technologies with Web 2.0 being an important target area.

[download report]

who’s who?

There is more to life than computer science: See below, thanks to Wim Brilman a photo of our noble UT futsal team at the yearly christmas tournament. We won one game, one draw and lost three: We ended fifth in a group of six teams. Could be worse

Yesterday, Sander Evers presented his composable Markov building blocks at the Dutch Belgian Database Day (DBDBD) in Eindhoven.

The DBDBD is a yearly one-day workshop organized in a Belgian or Dutch university, whose general topic is database research. DBDBD had presentations on a broad range of database and database-related topics, including but not limited to data storage and management, theoretical database issues, database performance, data mining, information retrieval, data semantics, querying, ontologies etc.

Read more on the DBDBD site

See below the brave SIKS students that successfully finished the course Research methods and methodology. The primary goal of this hands-on course is to enable Ph.D. students to make a good research design for their own research project. To this end, it provides an interactive training in various elements of research design, such as the conceptual design and the research planning. But the course also contains a general introduction to the philosophy of science (and particularly to the philosophy of mathematics, computer science and AI). And, it addresses such divergent topics as “the case-study method”, “elementary research methodology for the empirical sciences” and “empirical methods for computer science”.