Research Challenges in Devising the Next Generation Information Access Systems for the Web

Speaker: Emine Yilmaz, Professor of Computer Science and Turing Fellow, UCL Department of Computer Science

Date/time: Wednesday 27th February

Part 1: 12.15-13.00 Pre-seminar mixer. Refreshments and networking. Please come and join us for drinks and light snacks. Meet fellow students and staff in MPEB before the lecture in Roberts Building

Location: lobby, 5th Floor, MPEB (Malet Place Place Engineering Building)

Part 2: 13.00-14.00 seminar G06 Sir Ambrose Fleming Lecture Theatre, Roberts Building.

Abstract

During the last few years how people access information in the web has changed significantly. Smart phones and intelligent assistants has now made the Web an integral part of our every day lives. This change has led to several research challenges that need to be tackled, such as the need for making search systems/intelligent assistants more accessible and smarter, as well as the need for detecting misinformation and bias available online.

In this talk I will talk about the research we have been doing within my research group regarding these two areas. I will first talk about the work we have done in devising systems that are closer towards understanding users when they use the Web and how we have made such systems more intelligent. In the second part, I will be talking about the research we have done in detecting misinformation and bias available in online systems such as search engines and newspapers.

Biography

Emine Yilmaz is a Turing Fellow and Professor at University College London, Department of Computer Science. She also works as a research consultant for Microsoft. Her research until now has received several awards including a Bloomberg Data Science Research Award in 2018, the Karen Sparck Jones Award in 2015 and the Google Faculty Research Award in 2014. Emine's current research interests include information retrieval, data mining and applications of machine learning. She has published research papers extensively at major venues such as ACM SIGIR, CIKM and WSDM, gave several tutorials as part of top conferences, and organized various workshops. Her research has been widely adopted by the information retrieval community and the sampling methods she has designed for efficient retrieval evaluation have been commonly used and made publicly available by the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC). She has served in various roles including PC Chair for the ACM SIGIR 2018 and ACM ICTIR 2017 Conferences, Practice and Experience Chair for ACM WSDM 2017, and as the Doctoral Consortium Chair for ECIR 2017. She is an elected member of the executive committee of ACM SIGIR.