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

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.

Inner Game of Innovation – 2nd Part

Most people think that disruptive innovation is the only significant type of innovation and all other types of innovation cannot be treated at par with this one as they are somewhat inferior. I would have agreed with this view had I not come across “Dealing with Darwin” (by Geoffrey Moore), the book I talked about in the previous blog with the same title.

When I learnt that there are several types of innovations categorized into various zones in the life cycle of a product or a technology. These zones include: Product leadership (birth and early struggle of the product/technology), Customer Intimacy (where the product is making into the heart of the customer, making its space in the customer mind and life), Operation excellence (build the same product better, faster and cheaper - here is the zone where Indian software service companies showed a lot of innovation) and finally Category renewal (where you know when, where and how to stop the technology and move all the lessons learnt into something new which takes you to the next level). In these four zones there are about 15 types of innovations.

I have focused mostly on these aspects when I finally gave my talkon Innovation at CA (on 29th January). It was a great learning experience for me as I thoroughly enjoyed my preparation for this talk.

If some one is interested in learning more about these concepts they should buy and read this book AND refer to Geff’s website:

www.dealingwithdarwin.com 

IJCNLP-2008 Conference

Today is the beginning of NLP festival (all conferences are like festivals as we celebrate our research and have loads of fun) right here in IIIT Campus and I am happy to see most of SIELers taking very active part as organizers, volunteers and participants.

There is one paper accepted in the main conference (a matter of pride for all of us) – this is based on Rohini’s work on personalization (many of you might know that U Rohini after graduating from here joined AOL R&D, Bangalore) – this paper will be presented on 10th of January 2008, between 15:30 – 17:00 Hrs in session A3.3 at ISB. The paper is:

“Statistical Translation Models for Personalized Search” – Rohini U, Vamshi Ambati and Vasudeva Varma

If you are participating in the conference, please attend this presentation.

We are also organizing 2nd International workshop  on Cross Language Information Access (CLIA-2008) along with IJCNLP (W4). For more information see the website of the workshop:

http://search.iiit.ac.in/CLIA2008

See you all there - and we will be looking forward to hear your experiences.

Introduction

Welcome aboard, comrades!

This is the group-blog of Search and Information Extraction Lab, aka SIEL. SIEL is a part of Language Technologies Research Center (LTRC) at International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H), India. Our aim to share our thoughts and ideas on the work we do and to keep ourselves abreast about the events happening in the field of Information Retrieval. We write here on the recent developments in the field that we came to know, what we are doing now and ofcourse, the funnier part of our lives too. After all, what is life without fun?

Please do read through, drop in your comments and suggestions here. We will keep ourselves updated regularly. Keep visiting.