Events

UIUC CS professor Zhai reviews texts information management. ChenXiang start reviewing the importance of text as a natural way to encode human knowledge. His main focus is how he can provide support for different usages of text information, and how they interact to models, applications, systems and algorithms. This allowed him to motivate future research directions on information retrieval. Some of his interesting words: Future research directions require improvements on IR and NLP (shallow: POS, partial parsing, fragmental semantic analysis), but it is fragile and domain oriented. Machine learning algorithms are still no scalable and not enough training data to satisfy the algorithm requirements. Data mining has lots of algorithms, but only for salient patterns. ...

Randy opens fire reviewing models of parallelisms and how Google’s Mpa-Reduce model (the core of Yahoo’s Hadoop) is changing the picture. He is emphasizing how data is and integral part of the computational process (which has been greatly unregarded). Map-Reduce model can greatly help because of it fault tolerant capabilities. Now he is reviewing the two traditional parallel programming models (shared model and message-passing model) and how this differ from map-reduce (and how this increases the IO). Initiatives like Hadoop allow to cut-down cost for accessing large scale computing. ...

I am lucky to attend the Big Data Computing Study Group 2008. The line of speaker is impressive. The event is held at Yahoo! Sunnyvale, and Thomas Kwan (UIUC alumni know at Yahoo!) is helping organize it. I will keep blogging about it the rest of the day.

I just got an email from the GECCO 2008 organizers extending the deadline till January 2008.

The deadline for the next Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2008) is approaching. Januray 16, 2008 is the date. Get ready!