Unforgettable Week at WWW2008 in Beijing
“One World, One Web” was the theme at the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008), held April 21 to 25 in Beijing, China. The conference brought together members of the research community from around the world, including representatives from Yahoo!, Microsoft, eBay, Google, Amazon, AT&T, HP, IBM, Cisco, and major universities and research institutions. The conference explored how Web access is moving from the desktop to cell phones and TV screens, and how most users are moving from passive browsing experiences on the Internet to active participation in building Web communities. This year, Yahoo! repeated their unrivaled presence. Search scientist Andrew Tomkins served as PC co-chair and Yahoo! had a total of 11 refereed papers -- the most from any participating organization.
With the Olympic Stadium in view, attendees flooded the Beijing International Convention Center to see the opening ceremony. As a derivative of the 2008 Olympic theme, “One World, One Dream,” the conference theme was prominent throughout the keynote talks. Kai Fu Lee, president of Google Greater China, focused on cloud computing – developing ways to turn people’s PC lives into something not tied to any single device. Cloud computing is changing the way we use the Internet, according to Lee, and while PCs are normally our window to the world, mobile devices can do more.
A series of workshops were held prior to the opening of the conference. One workshop that was widely discussed among attendees covered linked data intricately. The size of the Web of Data has grown to several billion RDF triples which are served by a network of interlinked data sources and cover domains such as geographic information, people, companies, online communities, films, music, books and scientific publications. In addition to publishing and interlinking datasets, there is also ongoing work on linked data browsers, linked data crawlers, Web of Data search engines and other applications that consume linked data from the Web. One of the major themes across all presentations was how to handle disambiguation, but a significant take-away was the role that data plays in enabling the next phase of the Web.
There were a variety of interesting papers at the conference. “Spatial Variation in Search Engine Queries” by Cornell University and Yahoo! Research provided a fascinating look at how any search query can have a geographic center – including one that changes over time. Microsoft Research’s “Using the Wisdom of the Crowds for Keyword Generation” focused on how keyword suggestions for advertisers can be generated by monitoring click logs. Also by Microsoft Research, the paper “Performance of Compressed Inverted List Caching in Search Engines” gave a nice background on how search engines quickly find and cache results. And “Tag-based Social Interest Discovery” by Yahoo! gave insight into how human tags can be a more relevant way of determining the main topic of a page than keyword analysis.
Mobility, accessibility, security and rich media were also major areas of emphasis. A panel of social media experts believe that in 2020, social media will be far more pervasive, interlinked and location-aware than now.
The Yahoo! booth served as a central demo point and social meeting location for all attendees. Yahoo! scientists attracted large crowds for their presentations on the latest open source and search projects. Another highlight of the week was a visit to Yahoo! China by Yahoo! researchers to discuss some of these projects.
Many social events were scheduled as part of the conference. Perhaps the most memorable experience was the conference banquet, held at the rarely accessible Great Hall of the People. Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee welcomed the crowd and made it clear that the Web is growing – and nowhere is this more evident than the very location of the conference, where Web usage continues to grow as quickly as Web development.
In what has quickly become a WWW staple, Yahoo! held its annual bash at the Crowne Plaza Wuzhou Park View, adjacent to the convention center. Nearly 150 party-goers attended the bash to take on the latest Yahoo! challenge: a Boggle-style puzzle that captured some major themes of China. The high degree of difficulty had many party-goers stumped, but one managed to find enough answers to walk away as the grand prize winner of the Blu-Ray player.
Overall, the conference was a huge success as the hope was to strengthen research collaborations all over the world – it appeared to have accomplished much more. Many attendees are looking forward to next year’s conference in Madrid, Spain.
Spot the Yahoo! and you could be one of us!
Yahoo! Research Papers at WWW 2008
- Spatial Variation in Search Engine Queries: Backstrom, L; Kleinberg, J; Kumar, R; Novak, J
- Query-Sets: Using Implicit Feedback and Query Patterns to Organize Web Documents: Poblete, B; Baeza-Yates, R
- Externalities in Online Advertising: Ghosh, A; Mahdian, M
- Genealogical Trees on the Web: A Search Engine User Perspective: Baeza-Yates, R; Pereira, A; Ziviani, N
- A Graph-Theoretic Approach to Webpage Segmentation: Chakrabarti, D; Kumar, R; Punera, K
- Statistical Properties of Community Structure in Large Social and Information Networks: Leskovec, J; Lang, K; Dasgupta, A; Mahoney, M
- Contextual Advertising by Combining Relevance with Click Feedback: Chakrabarti, D; Agarwal, D; Josifovski, V
- Flickr Tag Recommendation based on Collective Knowledge: Sigurbjörnsson, B; van Zwol, R
- Recrawl Scheduling Based on Information Longevity: Olston, C; Pandey, S
- Enhanced Hierarchical Classification via Isotonic Smoothing: Punera, K; Ghosh, J
- Online Learning from Click Data for Sponsored Search: Ciaramita, M; Murdock, V; Plachouras, V
