Djoerd Hiemstra’s home page

Photos taken by Wessel Kraaij and Suzan Verberne during DIR 2010 in Nijmegen are now on-line

The 3rd SIKS/Twente Seminar on Searching and Ranking takes place on January 29, 2010 at the University of Twente. The goal of the one day workshop is to bring together researchers from companies and academia working on the effectiveness of search engines. The workshop will take place at the University of Twente at the Spiegel (building 2), lecture hall SP-6. Speakers are:

• Leif Azzopardi (University of Glasgow, UK)
• Arjen de Vries (CWI and University of Delft)
• Vanessa Murdock (Yahoo Research, Barcelona, Spain)

After the seminar, Claudia Hauff will defend her PhD Thesis: Predicting the Effectiveness of Queries and Retrieval Systems. The seminar is sponsored by SIKS (the Netherlands research School for Information and Knowledge Systems) and the CTIT (Centre for Telematics and Information Technology). For more information, check out the SSR 2010 website.

The Dutch Belgian Database Day (DBDBD) is a yearly one-day workshop organized in a Belgian or Dutch university, whose general topic is database research. DBDBD invites submissions (1 page abstract) 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. Based on the submissions, the workshop will be organized in different sessions each covering a particular topic.

At the DBDBD, junior researchers from the Netherlands and Belgium can present their recent results. It is an excellent opportunity to meet up with your Belgian/Dutch colleagues, and to get informed about the (recent) database-related research performed in Belgian/Dutch universities. The workshop is also open to non-Belgian/Dutch participants (presentations are in English).

The DBDBD 2009 is organized under auspices of SIKS, the Dutch research school for information and knowledge systems. This year, DBDBD will be held in the Aula Congrescentre of the TUDelft, located on the university campus, on Monday November 30th 2009. Participation is free for all SIKS-members (Phd-students, research fellows, senior research fellows and associated members).

Visit the DBDBD 2009 home page.

On 25, 26, and 27 November 2009, the School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) organizes the annual three-day course Research methods and methodology for IKS. The location will be Conference center Zonheuvel in Doorn. The course will be given in English and is part of the educational Program for SIKS-Ph.D. students.

Research methods and methodology for IKS is relevant for all SIKS-Ph.D.-students (whether working in computer science or in information science), The primary goal of this hands-on course is to enable these 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”.

Research methods and methodology for IKS is an intense and interactive course. First, all students enrolling for this course are asked to read some pre-course reading material, comprising some papers that address key problems in IKS-methodology. These papers will be sent to the participants immediately after registration. Secondly, all participants are expected to give a brief characterization of their own research project/proposal, by answering a set questions, formulated by the course directors, and based on the aforementioned literature. We believe that this approach results in a more efficient and effective course; it will help you to prepare yourself for the course and this will increase the value that you will get from it. Course coordinators are Hans Weigand(UvT), Roel Wieringa(UT), John-Jules Meyer(UU), Hans Akkermans(VU) and Richard Starmans (UU)

Program
Wednesday
09.30-10.00 Coffee / Tea
10.00-10.30 Opening (Richard Starmans, UU)
10.30-11.30 Introduction (Hans Weigand,UvT)
11.30-12.30 Conceptual design (Hans Weigand, UvT)
12.30-13.45 Lunch
13.45-15.30 Philosophy of formal sciences (John-Jules Meyer, UU )
15.30-16.00 Break
16.00-17.30 Research Methods in IR (Djoerd Hiemstra, UT)

Thursday
09.00-12.30 Research Design I (Roel Wieringa, UT)
12.30-13.30 Lunch
13.30-15.00 Research Design II (Roel Wieringa, UT)
15.00-15.30 Break
15.30-17.30 Research methods (Hans Akkermans, VU)

Friday
09.00-09.45 Example research project (Inge v/d Weerd, UU)
09.45-10.00 Break
10.00-11.00 Research challenges in the Netherlands (Jaap van den Herik, UvT)
11.00-12.15 Research methods in MAS (Catholijn Jonker, TUD)
12.15-13.15 Lunch
13.15-14.45 Simulation as a research method (Jack Kleijnen, UvT)
14.45-15.00 Break
15.00-16.15 Research methods in Machine Learning (Antal van den Bosch,UvT)

On November 16, 2009, the School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) organizes its annual SIKS-day. The location will be Grand Hotel Karel V in Utrecht.

The main aim of the event is to give SIKS-members, participating in research groups all over the country, the opportunity to meet each other in an informal setting and to inform them about current developments and some new activities and plans for the coming year. This year we also celebrate the fact that our school has been re-accredited by KNAW this summer for another period of six years. A small scientific symposium will be organized at the SIKS-day as well.

Program

10.00 - 10.30 Coffee and Tea
10.30 - 10.45 Welcome by Hans Akkermans (VU), Chair Board of Governors SIKS
10.45 - 11.30 “Self-organizing access and storage of correlated data: crossing the frontier of structured data management” by Peter Boncz (CWI)
11.30 - 12.15 “Knowlege Representation on the Web: what to do when success is becoming a problem?” by Frank van Harmelen (VU)
12.15 - 12.30 “SIKS: Accreditation Outcome and Future Plans” by Roel Wieringa (UT), Scientific Director SIKS
12.30 - 13.45 Lunch
13.45 - 14.00 “The SIKS PhD Advisory Board: Going where the wild things are” by Nieske Vergunst (UU), Chair Phd Advisory Board
14.00 - 14.45 “The Minimum Description Length Principle for Data Mining” by Arno Siebes (UU)
14.45 - 15.15 Coffee and Tea
15.15 - 16.00 “On the Usability of Business Process Models: A Formal and Empirical Approach” by Hajo Reijers (TUE)
16.00 - 16.45 “Professor Kripke, let me introduce Professor Nash: Logic for Economic Mechanism Design” by Michael Wooldridge (Liverpool, UK)
16.45 - 18.00 Drinks

The Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval (DIR 2010) will take place at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, on January 25-26, 2010. The primary aim of the DIR is to provide an international meeting place where researchers from the domain of information retrieval and related disciplines can exchange information and present innovative research developments.

Important dates
Paper submission deadline: November 13, 2009
Notification of acceptance: December 11, 2009
Conference at Radboud University Nijmegen: January 25-26, 2010

Call for papers at DIR 2010.

On June 24, 2009 at the University of Twente

http://www.cs.utwente.nl/~hiemstra/ssr2009/

The goal of the one day seminar is to bring together researchers from companies and academia working on enterprise search problems. Speakers at the seminar are: David Hawking from Funnelback Internet and Enterprise Search & the Australian National University, who will talk about Practical Methods for Evaluating Enterprise Search. Iadh Ounis from the University of Glasgow will present Voting Techniques for Expert Search. Maarten de Rijke from the University of Amsterdam will talk about Expert Profiling Out In the Wild.

Excellent photos by Sander Bockting

Welcome to the 9th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR). I very well remember the DIR workshop in 2001 that was also organized in Twente. It took place exactly one day before my PhD defense, to give us the opportunity to have one of the PhD committee members, Stephen Robertson, as the keynote speaker. I am proud to see that DIR does not need PhD defenses any more to attract excellent keynotes. This year, DIR presents Rene van Erk, Director of Product- and Business Development Europe at Wolters Kluwer as the industry keynote; we present professor Gerhard Weikum, Scientific Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, as the academic keynote. We also present comedian Daniel van Veen as the “cultural keynote” to let our participants taste a bit of our university’s unique campus activities.

We have tried this year to especially encourage PhD students and researchers from industry to submit their research. Each submission was reviewed by at least two and often three or four program committee members. We thank the program committee members for their high quality reviews. Of 15 submissions to DIR, 12 were accepted. Another 5 submissions were accepted as poster presentations. Four papers were written with participation from industry and most other papers have a PhD student as the first author.

Special thanks to the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) for sponsoring the participation of Dutch SIKS members, to the Werkgemeenschap Informatiewetenschap (WGI) for providing a solid financial basis for organizing DIR now and in the future, to the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO) for sponsoring the travel and hotel costs of our international keynote speaker Gerhard Weikum, to the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT) for sponsoring the proceedings, to the University of Twente and to Cultural Center the Vrijhof for sponsoring our cultural activity on Monday.

To an inspiring DIR 2009!

On April 20 and 21 2009 the School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) will organize an advanced course on “Probabilistic Methods for Entity Resolution and Entity Ranking”. The course takes two days, will be given in English and is part of the Advanced Components Stage of the Educational Program for SIKS-PhD Students. Although these courses are primarily intended for SIKS-PhD Students, other participants are not excluded. However, their number of passes will be restricted and depends on the number of students taking the course. The course is given by experienced lecturers actively involved in the research areas related to the topics of the course. Especially PhD-students working on the SIKS-foci “Data management, Storage and Retrieval” and “Web-based Informationr Systems” are strongly encouraged to participate.

LOCATION: Conference Center Woudschoten, Zeist
DATE: 20-21 April 2009
SCIENTIFIC DIRECTORS: Djoerd Hiemstra and Maurice van Keulen

More information at SIKS.