Modern Information Retrieval, 2nd ed. will be a key textbook in information retrieval during the coming years, and I expect it to be as successful as its first incarnation.

The book has been completely rewritten, including four new chapters and a new appendix, many new topics and more teaching resources. Overall has 18 chapters and appendices, 913 pages (more than 1,100 in the font of the first edition) and 1,800 references.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto wrote about 60% of the book and participated in all but 5 chapters. Many people collaborated in several chapters; in my case I co-authored the chapter on Web Crawling.

Several chapters can be downloaded as well as slides for teaching from http://mir2ed.org/

Today Yahoo! launched Clues, a service based on science from Yahoo! Research Barcelona.

Yahoo! Clues lets you explore how people are using Yahoo! Search. When you enter a word or phrase in the "Search Term" field and click Discover, you’ll see information about that search term’s popularity over time, across demographic groups, and in different locations.

You can also enter a second search term in the "Compare With" field. This will show you information on both search terms, side by side.

Among other things, it allow users to browse a real query-flow graph:

clues.yahoo.com

These are the slides from our paper [pdf] on creating teams automatically. It was presented last week by Aris Gionis at CIKM'10 in Toronto, Canada.

This research is about creating and assigning teams on-the-fly as a stream of tasks arrives. It is particularly useful for "horizontal" organizations where there is not a single control point deciding who gets to do what. The algorithm we present tries to balance effectiveness (allocating the rights teams to each task) and fairness (dividing evenly the workload among people, even if they have different skills).

Aris Anagnostopoulos, Carlos Castillo, Aristides Gionis, Luca Becchetti, Stefano Leonardi: "Power in Unity: Forming Teams in Large-Scale Community Systems" [pdf]. Proc. of CIKM 2010, pp. 599-608.Toronto, Canada. ACM Press.

You have to see this video full of witty, funny, signs at the rally. I loved this "[citation needed]" one!

There is also a page with the top 100 best signs :-) One of my favorites is the first one, and old man holding a sign that reads:

I fought nazis and they don't look like Obama.

And this one below:

Video