MATH Seminar

Title: Towards Accessible IR: Helping children search the Web
Seminar: Computer Science
Speaker: Pavel Serdyukov of Delft University of Technology
Contact: Eugene Agichtein, eugene@mathcs.emory.edu
Date: 2010-04-23 at 3:00PM
Venue: MSC W301
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Abstract:
Developing children's abilities to find and understand information is a key to their development as young adults. The Internet offers children exciting new ways to meet people, learn about different cultures and develop their creative potential. However, children's ability to use the Internet is severely hampered by the lack of appropriate search tools. Most Information Retrieval (IR) systems are designed for adults: they return information in a form that is unsuitable for children and they do not provide enough assistance to make the search for appropriate content rewarding and fun. The talk will present the state-of-the-art and recent research on children’s search behavior and describe problems and challenges that lie ahead, with regard to adapting current IR systems for children. It will also give an overview of the current studies being conducted in the scope of the EU-funded research project “PuppyIR”: on finding web-content appropriate for children, on analyzing query logs to understand children’s information needs and on providing query assistance functionality. \\ Pavel Serdyukov is a researcher at the Multimedia Information Retrieval Lab, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Twente University in 2009. His research interests include expert/entity search in enterprises, accessible search, geographical multimedia search and search in social media. He is currently leading a research effort aimed at studying how to modify traditional views on relevance ranking to satisfy children's information needs on the Web. He is also a co-organizer of the Entity track at TREC 2010 and SIGIR 2010 Workshop on Accessible Search Systems. More information and publication record can be found at http://dmirlab.tudelft.nl/users/pavel-serdyukov.
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