Profession and academia

The Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) is one of the top venues in computer science. In this year's edition SODA'10, there is a paper by Flavio Chierichetti, Silvio Lattanzi and Alessandro Panconesi: "Rumour Spreading and Graph Conductance".

In the paper, there is a very interesting footnote in the front page:

For the role of the Italian Ministry of University and Research please see the Unacknowledgements.

This is what you find at the end of the paper (emphasis added):

Unacknowledgements: This work is ostensibly supported by the the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the FIRB program, project RBIN047MH9-000. The Ministry however has not paid its dues and it is not known whether it will ever do.

I hope the Ministry will pay now!

Correlator is a new way of searching information. It is currently built on top of the English Wikipedia, but can use any source of information as its data collection.

Given a query, it first assembles an "overview" page synthesized from sentences in Wikipedia articles. It also analyzes matching phrases to find names of persons, locations, and dates related to the query. Then, these results are presented in a way that is dependent on the type of entity: persons are shown in a sociograph, locations on a map, and dates on a timeline.

Correlator was launched a few days ago. TRY IT!: Dinosaurs in Argentina, transistor or Picasso and Peace.

The Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web workshop is now in its fifth edition! The deadline for research articles is February 13, 2009.

Adversarial Information Retrieval addresses tasks such as gathering, indexing, filtering, retrieving and ranking information from collections wherein a subset has been manipulated maliciously. On the Web, the predominant form of such manipulation is search engine spamming (or spamdexing), i.e., malicious attempts to influence the outcome of ranking algorithms, aimed at getting an undeserved high ranking for some
items in the collection. Topics include:

• Link spam
• Content spam
• Cloaking
• Blog/forum/wiki spam
• Tag spam
• Review and rating spam
• Click fraud detection
• Reverse engineering of ranking algorithms
• Web content filtering
• Online advertisement blocking
• Stealth crawling

For more information, see http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/2009/cfp.html

Talent follows a normal distribution, but responsibilities follow an exponential distribution.