Baeza-Yates delivers ECML Keynote Address

Ricardo Baeza-Yates had the honor of presenting the keynote address at this year’s European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) and European Conference on Principles and Practice of Knowledge (PKDD).

The conferences, which typically attract hundreds of thought leaders in data mining and machine learning, were jointly held in Warsaw, Poland from September 17-21. All told, some 350 people from across the globe attended ECML/PKDD 2007.

Nearly every attendee jammed the conference hall to hear the keynote address given by Baeza-Yates, who is head of Yahoo! Research Europe and Latin America.

His keynote, Mining Queries, detailed how queries in search engines and websites can provide valuable information on the interests of users. The well-received talk explained how this kind of information can be leveraged to improve the performance of search engines, recommend better queries, enhance the information scent of website content, and ultimately capture more knowledge.

Though there were no clear themes going into ECML/PKDD 2007, several intriguing trends did emerge from this year’s conference. One of those trends, says Baeza-Yates, was “data mining of non-traditional data” and new applications related to that.

After this year’s successful event, attendees are eagerly gearing up for next year’s conference in Antwerp, Belgium.