Yahoo! Research Leads Technical Program at WSDM 2008 Debut

Yahoo! Research was a gold sponsor of the First ACM International Conference on
Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2008), held February 11 and 12 at Stanford University, Stanford, CA. In its debut year, WSDM 2008 drew a larger than expected crowd from both academia and industry, including researchers from co-sponsors Google, Microsoft, Ask and eBay. Yahoo! Research led the technical program, authoring one-fifth of the accepted papers and holding several positions on the program committees. Andrei Broder was program committee co-chair. Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Prabhakar Raghavan were members of the senior program committee.

Some of the more prominent themes of the meeting were Web search advertising, ranking and crawling. Of particular interest were algorithm design and analysis, economic implications, and the social Web. A paper by Paul Heymann, Georgia Koutrika and Hector Garcia-Molina raised some interesting issues on social bookmarking. “Can Social Bookmarks Improve Web Search?” looked at whether data from social bookmark sites can improve Web search. Even though they found the data to be of high quality, the authors come to the conclusion that bookmarking is not likely to be useful because the data only covers about 0.1% of the Web.

Andrew Tomkins, Ravi Kumar, and Jasmine Novak co-authored a paper with Cameron Marlow of Facebook and Lars Backstrom of Cornell University entitled, “Preferential Behavior in Online Groups.” The authors address how the depth and longevity of engagement for users in these online communities can directly impact the way they are treated by other users.

These processes of group formation, growth, and dissolution are central in social science, and in an online venue they have ramifications for the design and development of community software.

In keeping with the social theme, several participants enjoyed a post-conference tour of local Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! campuses. Research heads from each company welcomed tour-goers – some gave a glimpse of current research projects. The tour was especially interesting for attendees from academia as it provided a glimpse at the real-world problems that search engines are currently facing. The tour also gave them exposure to corporate culture and the life as an employee at each location.

Considering the fact that this was the debut year for WSDM 2008, many of the attendees were impressed, commenting that the conference was “super organized” and that “the paper quality was well above par.”