Opening Keynote
Search, Explore, Modify Engine
Arjen P. de Vries, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, NL
The role of search intermediaries and their interaction with users has the highest value in the "formative stages" of exploration and formulation of the information seeking process. However, one may wonder whether today's technology provides the search intermediary sufficient control to let them respond aptly to the users' articulation of their information need. Can we improve system support during the exploration of one or more richly annotated information sources and, perhaps even more importantly, can we provide search intermediaries with the means to decide for themselves how to navigate this "semantically" enriched document space? These two challenges are addressed in the new interaction paradigm referred to as "search by strategy": separate search strategy definition (the "how") from the actual searching and browsing (the "what"). The envisioned iterative two-step process lets search intermediaries define (and in later iterations refine) their search strategy, using a visual query environment (the "search strategy builder"). The faceted browsing of (intermediate) result sets enables discovery of the semantic annotations most useful for the information seeking problem at hand. The constructed search strategy provides a blue-print of the search engine that was generated in response, capturing the full details of the followed information seeking process; ready for reuse in future, highly similar tasks.
De Vries received his PhD in 1999, on the integration of (multimedia) information retrieval and database systems. He is especially interested in the design of database systems that support search in multimedia
digital libraries. He has worked on a variety of research topics, including (multimedia) information retrieval, entity ranking and expert finding, database architecture, query processing, retrieval system evaluation, and ambient intelligence.
In 2004, De Vries and his then PhD student Westerveld received the best paper award in the international conference on image and video retrieval (CIVR); in 2007, De Vries and his PhD student Cornacchia received the best student paper award in the European conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR); and, recently, he received a Microsoft Bing Most Innovative Award for the CSDM 2011 paper co-authored with PhD student Eickhoff.
De Vries has been the general co-chair of the ACM SIGIR 2007 conference in Amsterdam. He is programme (co-)chair of IRFC 2011, the CIKM 2011 Information Retrieval track, and, ECIR 2012. He is a member of the TREC PC, and a steering committee member of INEX (the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval).