Eugene Agichtein

Mathematics and Computer Science Department

Emory University

For more information please contact  Dr. Hongyuan Zha; zha@cc.gatech.edu

"Modeling User Interactions in Web Search and Social Media"

Abstract:

Social media is transforming online information access in at least three ways: as a prominent part of the web information ecosystem, as a platform for information seeking, and as a planet-scale experimental infrastructure for studying human behavior. In particular, Collaborative Question Answering (CQA) model has emerged as a potential alternative to web search: participants post questions and answers, and rate and evaluate each other's contributions. The resulting archives of both the content and the context of the interactions provide a testbed for development of novel natural language processing, text mining, and information retrieval techniques. I will describe our new techniques for mining social media for tasks such as estimating content quality, contributor authority, and information seeker intent and satisfaction with the results. While the primary goal of this work is improving information access, I will also describe, if time permits, connections to medical informatics and public health research.

Bio:

Dr. Eugene Agichtein is an Assistant Professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Emory University where he directs the Intelligent InformationAccess laboratory. Eugene’s research interests are in information retrieval, user modeling, text and data mining, and natural language processing. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2005, and a B.S. in Engineering from the Cooper Union in 1998.  Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the  Text Mining, Search, and Navigation group at Microsoft Research, and a consulting researcher at Yahoo! Research. Eugene's work was recognized with a Microsoft ”Beyond Search” award, Yahoo! faculty research award, and a SIGMOD 2006 best paper award.

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You are cordially invited to attend a reception that will follow the seminar to chat informally with faculty and students. Refreshments will be provided.

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