[Colloquium] Talk by Ian Witten on Thursday, November 1, 2007

[Margery Ishmael]

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE - TALK

Date: Thursday, November 1, 2007
Time: 12:00 noon
Place: Ryerson 251

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Speaker:  IAN WITTEN
From: University of Waikato, New Zealand

Web page:  http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ihw/

Title: Finding documents and reading them: Keyphrase indexing, Topic  
browsing, Realistic books

Abstract: My research group in New Zealand is working on several  
projects in information retrieval. I will present an algorithm for  
automatically extracting keyphrases that uses machine learning to  
determine the most significant phrases in a document based on their  
statistical, syntactic, and semantic properties. I will describe a  
novel interface for interactive query expansion that uses a thesaurus  
derived from Wikipedia to bridge the terminology of the user's query  
and the terminology used within documents. Finally I will demonstrate  
a realistic three-dimensional book-style visualization of documents  
in a digital library collection. Physical book models offer readers  
something beyond traditional computer-based paging or scrolling  
systems, and can be enhanced with metadata to further enrich the  
browsing experience.

Bio: Ian H. Witten is Professor of Computer Science at the University  
of Waikato in New Zealand where he directs the New Zealand Digital  
Library research project. His research interests include information  
retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by  
demonstration. He has published widely in these areas, including  
several books, the most recent being Managing Gigabytes (1999), How  
to build a digital library (2003), Data Mining (2005) and Web Dragons  
(2007), all from Morgan Kaufmann. He received an MA in mathematics  
from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in computer science from  
the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in electrical  
engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM  
and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He received the 2004 IFIP  
Namur Award, a biennial honour accorded for “outstanding contribution  
with international impact to the awareness of social implications of  
information and communication technology” and the 2005 SIGKDD Service  
Award for “an outstanding contribution to the data mining field” and  
in 2006 the Royal Society of New Zealand Hector Medal for “an  
outstanding contribution to the advancement of the mathematical and  
information sciences.”

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Host:  Ian Foster

People in need of assistance should call 773-834-8977 in advance.

For information on future CS talks: http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/events



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