Cloud Computing and IR

Here is a post on Search Engine Watch (SEW) today:

Cloud Computing Unites Yahoo, HP, Intel

Yahoo, Intel and Hewlett Packard announced an alliance to advance “cloud computing,” backing a global trend that threatens Microsoft’s iron-fisted grip on packaged software installed on computers.

Earlier this year Google and IBM teamed up to advance research into providing SAAS (software as a service) on the Internet hosted by data centers.

Cloud computing isn’t as futuristic as it sounds. Web-based email (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail) offered by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft is an example of cloud computing. Google has expanded its online software offerings to include word documents, spread sheets and more under the Google Docs brand.

The cloud computing initiative falls in line with Yahoo’s goal of open systems. Results of research done at the centers will be made public to make it easier for software developers to write applications for cloud computing.

“We believe this collaboration will do a great deal to take the research to the next level,” Yahoo Research chief Prabhakar Raghavan said during the conference call.

“We are really fueling the ecosystem here… Inevitably an application developer will build more readily for the cloud.”

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Guys, reserve your seats in the course on “Topics in Software Architecture” CS6600 this semester. The theme of this course changes every year and for this year it is “Cloud Computing”.

There will be guest lectures from Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo. BTW, There are only 20 seats available

Cuil Launches Biggest Search Engine on the Web

Cuil, a technology company pioneering a new approach to search, launches its innovative search offering, which combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy.

Summary of Cuil’s features:

• Biggest Internet search engine—Cuil has indexed 120 billion Web pages, 3x more than any other search engine
• Organized results—Cuil’s magazine-style layout separates results by subject and allows further search by concept or category
• Different results—Unlike other search engines, Cuil ranks results by the content on each page, not its popularity
• Complete privacy protection—Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories

For more information, refer the following links.

http://www.cuil.com
http://searchengineland.com/080728-000100.php

Summer Activities in NLP/IR

As the summer break is coming to an end, all the SIELers are geared up to start the fresh semester with a sense of accomplishment, I believe. This summer, many of us are busy with various activities such as preparing for TAC and CLEF competitions, participating in summer schools and working on our projects (which is evident from the lack of posts in this blog)

We have submitted three runs for update summary task of TAC and also one for QA task. Let us keep our fingers crossed.

There were three summer events in NLP/IR areas where I gave a few talks:

• IASNLP at IIIT-H,
• NLP-Summer school at IIT Kharagpur and
• NLP-Ontology Summer workshop in IIT Bombay.

Each of these workshops were wonderful and I really enjoyed interacting with the participants. I focused on  IR/IE at IIIT-H workshop with a few examples on building scalable IE systems. My talk at IIT Kharagpur built on previous talk with a focus on recent trends in IE including the trend towards building frameworks. In IIT Bombay, I talked about personalization in IR/IE and IA.