Tuesday, July 28, 2009

One Night in Kobe

昨日招待講演無事終了、本日研究会発表後即東京帰還。

Friday, July 24, 2009

The Future of IR Evaluation workshop@SIGIR2009

*click to enlarge photo*

Jaap's opening remarks


Steve's invited talk





Sue's invited talk




The room is full, thank you


Chris' invited talk



Georges Dupret also gave an invited talk, though I couldn't get a picture.

Sue Dumais, Steve Robertson (Two Salton Award winners!) and Ichiro Suzuki,
from MSR Redmond, Cambridge and Asia, respectively

Thursday, July 23, 2009

The Third International Workshop on Evaluating Information Access (EVIA 2010)

EVIA 2010 will take place probably on Day 1 of NTCIR-8 (June 15-18, 2010, NII, Tokyo, Japan). In addition to Mark Sanderson and myself, we have a new chair, William Webber of Melbourne, Australia. Enjoy his research blog.
I'm sure he will do all the work and let Mark and I retire.

The SIGIR forum workshop reports on previous EVIAs are available online, by the way:

Tetsuya Sakai, Mark Sanderson and Noriko Kando,
EVIA 2008: The Second International Workshop on Evaluating Information Access,
SIGIR Forum, Vol.43 No.1, pp.44-46, 2009.

Sanderson, M., Sakai, T. and Kando, N.:
EVIA 2007: The First International Workshop on Evaluating Information Access,
SIGIR Forum, Vol.41, No.2, pp.109-111, 2007.

SIGIR 2009 - Wednesday part II (harbour cruise)



SIGIR 2009 - Wednesday part I

I confess to the world: I overslept and missed the Senior PC meeting.
Woke up at 8:15 and made the 8:30 session (evaluation and measurement I) which I chaired.

From Ben's talk: So this is what Kendall looked like!


From Gabriella's talk


From Falk's talk


SIGIR2010 - Geneva. SIGIR2011 - Beijing. SIGIR2012 - Portland, Oregon.


A little prize for a Senior PC member who overslept.

SIGIR 2009 - Tuesday

Everybody else is so diligently blogging and tweeting about SIGIR 2009.
As for me, you can see how much attention I've been paying for the whole day:



Nice banquet venue (JFK Presidential Library and Museum).

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

CNET article: U.K. court clears Google search in defamation case

Quote from http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10291217-38.html

It is fundamentally important to have in mind that the Third Defendant [Google] has no role to play in formulating the search terms...

What if the search engine proactively formulates search terms, like KotobaNoUchu does?

SIGIR 2009 - Monday

Attended the IRJ editorial board lunch meeting.
Presented a poster at the reception in the evening.

Sue Dumais is the second MSR researcher to receive the Salton Award. (The first is Steve Robertson.)


She's saying that, while documents have kept growing in size and diversity, the query input interface has not changed. Basically no progress here.

Google's paper: good abandonment = user finds the answer in the first result page. The comparison across US/Japan/China is interesting.

Posters and flyers



Leif presenting three posters at the same time

Justin

Alistair

Sakai & Nogami poster

Saturday, July 18, 2009

The Crab Pot

Dinner with Chin-Yew at The Crab Pot. King crab's really good!

Friday, July 17, 2009

Redmond, God

Now I'm in Redmond.
The immigration officer at San Francisco Airport
was puzzled to see a Japanese guy
emerge from a plane from Beijing,
wearing an Ichiro T-shirt.
When I told him I work for Microsoft Researh Asia,
he (an XP user) instantly complained about Vista.
Of course I told him to wait for Windows 7.
But we really should listen to what he said:
"You change things too often!"

The customer is god.

Note that Haruo Minami the singer never said this.
what he actually meant was "The audience is god".




A memorandum from my twelve-hour flight from Beijing to San Francisco:
A fourteen-year-old Chinese girl, avid fan of Japanese comic books,
especially Death Note, sat next to me. I hope she will become a manga artist
some day and make her dreams come true.