17 Monday Nov 2008
Posted in Conferences, Marketing Research
I’ll be today presenting at Interamerican University on search engine technologies and on a research project. I plan to cover how the PC + Digital TV fusion will provide an interesting platform for search engine marketing and research in general.
This is going to be fun.
13 Monday Oct 2008
Posted in Conferences, Hacking, Newsletters, Spam
For the last few years I have served as PC member of AIRWeb. I just received and accepted invitation to be a PC for AIRWeb 2009.
For those of you not familiar with, the International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web (AIRWeb)
http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/
has been held four times: in conjunction with the WWW’05, SIGIR’06, WWW’07, and WWW’08.
Topics discussed at the workshops include all forms of search engine spamming and hacking practices. SEO spamming practices are exposed and countermeasures are tested. It is a lot of fun examining in advance manuscript describing these malicous practices, months before the accepted papers hit mainstream.
Incidentally, the next issue of the IR Watch newsletter features Fraudulent Web Analytics, an article on adversarial techniques. We expose several practices spammers and hackers use to produce fake analytics and to defraud advertisers.
09 Tuesday Sep 2008
Posted in Conferences, Newsletters
IPAM (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA) sent us the current schedule for the upcoming workshop seminars. Back in January, 2006 we attended the now famous Document Space Workshop and the experience there was a real nirvana. We had the opportunity of meeting its then director, Dr. Mark Green and few other world class researchers like Dr. Michael Berry, an expert in LSI.
IPAM now has a new director and associate director. According to them:
“Dr. Russel Caflisch, UCLA professor of mathematics, was appointed as IPAM Director on July 1, 2008. Dr. Jichun Li, an associate professor of mathematics at University of Nevada Las Vegas, joined the IPAM scientific staff in August; he will serve a two-year term as one of IPAM’s Associate Directors, along with Dr. Christian Ratsch. Please help us welcome Dr. Caflisch and Dr. Li to IPAM!”
We highly recommend our readers that can to attend the IPAM workshops. For those interested in attending, the current schedule of events is given below.
Upcoming IPAM Long Programs:
Each IPAM long program will involve a community of senior and junior researchers. The intent is for long-term participants to have an opportunity to learn about the topic of the program from the perspectives of many different fields and to meet a diverse group of people and have an opportunity to form new collaborations. In addition to these activities, there will be opening tutorials, four workshops (each one is listed under “upcoming workshops”), and a culminating workshop at Lake Arrowhead. Funding is available both to attend our entire 3-month program and to attend individual workshops; those interested are encouraged to apply through the website of the program that interests them. Applications received at least six weeks in advance of the long program will receive fullest consideration.
Internet Multi-Resolution Analysis
September 8 – December 12, 2008
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/mra2008/
Quantum and Kinetic Transport Equations: Analysis, Computations, and New Applications
March 9 – June 12, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/kt2009/
Combinatorics: Methods and Applications in Mathematics and Computer Science
September 8 – December 11, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/cma2009/
Model and Data Hierarchies for Simulating and Understanding Climate
March 8 – June 11, 2010
Webpage will be posted soon.
Upcoming IPAM Workshops (through December 2009):
A registration form and an application for funding are available on each program’s webpage. Applications received six weeks in advance of the workshop will receive fullest consideration.
Internet MRA Tutorials
September 9 – 12, 2008
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/mratut/
Multiscale Representation, Analysis and Modeling of Internet Data and Measurements
September 22 – 26, 2008
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/mraws1/
Applications of Internet MRA to Cyber-Security
October 13 – 17, 2008
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/mraws2/
Beyond Internet MRA: Networks of Networks
November 3 – 7, 2008
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/mraws3/
New Mathematical Frontiers in Network Multi-Resolution Analysis
November 17 – 21, 2008
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/mraws4/
Quantitative and Computational Aspects of Metric Geometry
January 12 – 16, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/mg2009/
Numerical Approaches to Quantum Many-Body Systems
January 22 – 30, 2009
(Three-day tutorials followed by five-day workshop)
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/qs2009/
Laplacian Eigenvalues and Eigenfunctions: Theory, Computation, Application
February 9 – 13, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/le2009/
Rare Events in High-Dimensional Systems
February 23 – 27, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/re2009/
Quantum and Kinetic Transport Equations: Tutorials
March 10 – 13, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/kttut/
Computational Kinetic Transport and Hybrid Methods
March 30 – April 3, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/ktws1/
The Boltzmann Equation: DiPerna-Lions Plus 20 Years
April 15 – 17, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/ktws2/
Flows and Networks in Complex Media
April 27 – May 1, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/ktws3/
Asymptotic Methods for Dissipative Particle Systems
May 18 – 22, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/ktws4/
Combinatorics Tutorials
September 9 – 16, 2009
Webpage will be posted soon.
Probabilistic Techniques and Applications
October 5 – 9, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/cmaws1/
Combinatorial Geometry
October 19 – 23, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/cmaws2/
Topics in Graphs and Hypergraphs
November 2 – 6, 2009
http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/cmaws3/
Analytical Methods in Combinatorics, Additive Number Theory and Computer Science
November 16 – 20, 2009
22 Friday Aug 2008
Posted in Conferences
I received yesterday an email from Dr. Ellen Voorhees, Chair, TREC Program Committee, informing us of the new track proposal for TREC 2009. For those not familiar with TREC, as part of NIST, is where proponents gather to explore new IR and search technologies, retrieval models, frameworks, etc.
Sorry, but SEO non sense or hearsays are not allowed at TREC.
For additional information, visit
http://trec.nist.gov/overview.html
.
To disseminate the good news to our IR audience, I am reproducing the call below.
Dear TREC community,
TREC uses a track proposal mechanism to select the set of tracks to be run in a given TREC. We are currently soliciting proposals for tracks to include in TREC 2009. All candidate tracks (both existing and newly proposed) must submit a proposal by September 15, 2008. The submission deadline is in mid-September so that the TREC program committee will have time to make track selections before the TREC 2008 meeting in November. This allows the track discussions held at the TREC meeting to be informed as to the status of the track for the following year.
The criteria for judging a track proposal are as before: a strong advocate who is willing to be the track coordinator (track coordinator is a volunteer position); a large enough core of interested researchers to make the track viable; the availability of sufficient resources such as appropriate corpora and assessors with expertise in the area; and the fit with other tracks.
Proposals need to contain enough information for the PC to assess the criteria above. Proposals should contain an explicit statement of the goals of the track (i.e., what is expected to be learned and/or what infrastructure would be created if the track were run). If relevance judging (or some similar sort of annotation) is required, the proposal needs to include where the judging would occur (NIST or elsewhere?), any special qualifications the assessors would need (special domain expertise required?), as well as an estimate of the amount of time such assessing would will require. Any special constraints on the document sets needed should also be noted. Finally, proposals must contain full contact details of the proposer.
Proposals should be sent as either a postscript, PDF, or ASCII document to trec@nist.gov.
Ellen Voorhees
Chair, TREC program committee
29 Tuesday Apr 2008
Posted in Conferences, Spam
To facilitate mainstream dissemination of the manuscripts presented at AIRWeb 2008 here are the papers as listed over at
http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/2008/program.html
SEO spammers, whether your life gravitates around a “social network circus” or ”link building” or not, it is time to revisit your drawing board.
8:30 – 10:00
10:30 – 12:00
13:30 – 15:00
15:30 – 17:00
11 Friday Apr 2008
Posted in Conferences, Miscellaneous
I normally don’t rant at this blog about trivial stuff in life since this blog is about IR and search engine research. Today I feel like I want to make an exception. So let see how I can tie few rants about silly every-day things to search engines.
Rant 1
I bought the Home and Student version of Windows Office ($122, through Costco). The learning curve started. I tried to open its case by just pulling off the red tab as suggested. The red tab was detached from the case and still there was no “open Sesame”. I then tried different thing until decided to slice the clear seal at the top of the case with a knife and voila! Nothing like a puertorican solution for a “Made in Puerto Rico” Windows Vista product! Duh!
So the recipe is: (1) get a knife, (2) slice seal, and (3) pull with your fingers the case identations toward your right. The inside case should open.
Out of curiousity I wanted to know if others out there struggled with the design of the case. I ended up googling for how to open windows office case and found this site which discussed the very same problem and the very same solution. I realize I was not alone.
There are now dozen of sites like this one that show users this dumb “how-to”. Many are complaining about the “brilliant” design of the box, which is just an usability and accessibility nightmare.
Read what others at the aforementioned site are commenting. Some there commented that ended up searching for:
open office 2007 box
open vista box
Office Packaging “how to open”
open microsoft office box
how to open MS office 2007 box
Something from the product design side is wrong when soooo many have to Google for just how to open the damn case of a Microsoft product, or of any product for that matter. Some thing is wrong when Microsoft lab rats have to explain online how to open the annoying case.
Rant 2
There is a local conference on information security I was invited to. Down the organization pipeline, something is wrong with a conference when their organizers have to chase for potential presenters one week before the event. I pass and wish them good luck.
Rant 3
There is a local company that created a database-driven site for the upcoming Elections. The problem: how to get politicians and average users to know how to use the technology. Also, the site already needs to be redesigned so it can rank high and gain traffic from search engine users.
All these, kind of belong to the Land of Duh.
07 Monday Apr 2008
Posted in Conferences, Latent Semantic Indexing, SEO Myths
Tags
Here is a video of my presentation, Demystifying LSI, at the OJOBuscador Congress 2.0, Madrid, Spain, 2007. One year later, nothing has changed. Many of the same crook SEOs exposed during the congress are still deceiving the public about what is LSI.
Unfortunately, the quality of the video and lights are not good enough to see the pdf slides, plus the presentation is in Spanish. Since attendees were not scientists, I talked very slow for over an hour.
Want to get bored for the next hour? View the video.
Thanks to N. Valenzuela Alonso, Director of SEO and Search Engine Marketing of Media Bit, S.L. for the link (www.ithinksearch.com/2008/03/31/video-lsi-de-edel-garcia-desmitificando-lsi/).
Here is also the presentation of Carlos Castillo (Chato), from Yahoo! Research Spain:
Adversarial IR with Web Spam, parts 1 and 2
(
http://www.ojobuscador.com/2007/06/14/ir-con-adversario-y-webspam-videopost/
).
I spent great time talking with Carlos, a former grad student of Ricardo Baeza-Yates.
Baeza-Yates, Andrei Broder, Gerald Salton, and Keith van Rijsbergen and few others have helped to shape what is today known as Information Retrieval Research
Talking about Andrei Broder (one of the main researchers behind the old mighty Altavista), here is also a great interview, thanks to ojobuscador site:
http://www.ojobuscador.com/2006/05/20/entrevista-a-andrei-broder/
03 Thursday Apr 2008
Posted in Conferences, Data Mining
On April 23rd I’ll be presenting a seminar lecture at University of Puerto Rico, Bayamon (
http://www.uprb.edu
).
Topic, time, abstract, level, and requirements follows.
Topic: Understanding Search Engines
Time: 12 Noon
Abstract: What are search engines? How do they work? What are their main components? How do they analyze document relevancy? What it takes to rank a web page in the top 10 search results of Google, Yahoo, and other search engines? These questions will be addressed in this conference.
Level: Beginners.
Requirements: None.
If you are an uprb student, a faculty, or staff and happen to be an SEO or webmaster, don’t miss this rare opportunity to learn answers to these and similar questions.
I will also use that opportunity to promote the upcoming conference we are co-organizing at Polytechnic University:
Search Engines and Information Security
This will be held in October 3 & 4, 2008. Additional information will be provided soon at PUPR.edu and Mi Islita.com sites.
25 Monday Feb 2008
Posted in Conferences, Spam
AIRWEB organizers have instructed me to disseminate the following Final Call For Papers and deadline extension. Let’s fight the spammers and those disguised as SEOs.
We have extended the submission deadline until March 2, 2008. We would appreciate any assistance in disseminating this extension. The text version of the final call for papers is below and the pdf version is attached.
Best regards.
Carlos Castillo
Kumar Chellapilla
Dennis FetterlyFINAL CALL FOR PAPERS and 9 day extension
Fourth International Workshop on
Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web
http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/2008/
IMPORTANT DATES
02/March/2008 : Deadline for research articles
31/March/2008 : Deadline for challenge submissions
22/April/2008 : Workshop at the WWW 2008 conference in Beijing, ChinaContents:
1. AIRWeb’08 Topics
2. Web Spam Challenge
3. Timeline
4. Organizers and Program Committee1. AIRWEB’08 TOPICS
Adversarial Information Retrieval addresses tasks such as gathering,
indexing, filtering, retrieving and ranking information from
collections wherein a subset has been manipulated maliciously. On the
Web, the predominant form of such manipulation is “search engine
spamming” or spamdexing, i.e., malicious attempts to influence the
outcome of ranking algorithms, aimed at getting an undeserved high
ranking for some items in the collection.We solicit both full and short papers on any aspect of adversarial
information retrieval on the Web. Particular areas of interest
include, but are not limited to:* Link spam
* Content spam
* Cloaking
* Comment spam
* Spam-oriented blogging
* Click fraud detection
* Reverse engineering of ranking algorithms
* Web content filtering
* Advertisement blocking
* Stealth crawling
* Malicious tagging
* Ping spamProceedings of the workshop will be included in the ACM Digital
Library. Full papers are limited to 8 pages; work-in progress will be
permitted 4 pages. Papers should be formatted using the WWW2008
proceedings style and submitted via
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=airweb2008
For more information, see
http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/2008/
2. WEB SPAM CHALLENGE
Last year we introduced a novel element at the workshop: a Web Spam
Challenge for testing web spam detection systems. We will be holding
the Web Spam Challenge again this year, using the WEBSPAM-UK2007
collection for Web Spam Detection
http://www.yr-bcn.es/webspam
The collection includes large set of web pages, a web graph, and
human-provided labels for a set of hosts. We will also provide a set
of features extracted from the contents and links in the collection,
which may be used by the participant teams in addition to any
automatic technique they choose to use.We ask that participants of the Web Spam Challenge submit predictions
(normal/spam) for all unlabeled hosts in the collection. Predictions
will be evaluated and results will be announced at the AIRWeb 2008
workshop.For more information, see
3. TIMELINE
- 15 February 2008: E-mail intention to submit a workshop paper
(optional, but helpful)
- 02 March 2008: Deadline for workshop paper submissions (all day
- 24 March 2008: Notification of acceptance of workshop papers
- 31 March 2008: Challenge submissions due
- 07 April 2008: Camera-ready copy due
- 22 April 2008: Date of workshop4. ORGANIZERS AND PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Organizers
- Carlos Castillo, Yahoo! Research
- Kumar Chellapilla, Microsoft Live Labs
- Dennis Fetterly, Microsoft ResearchProgram Committee
- Einat Amitay, IBM
- Andras Benczar, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
- Paul-Alexandru Chiri, Uni Hannover
- James Caverlee, Texas A&M University
- Gordon Cormack, University of Waterloo
- Nick Craswell, Microsoft Research
- Matt Cutts, Google
- Brian Davison, Lehigh University
- Ludovic Denoyer, University Paris 6
- Aaron D’Souza, Google
- Edel Garcia, Mi Islita.com
- Natalie Glance, Nielsen BuzzMetrics
- Antonio Gulli, Ask.com
- Zoltan Gyongyi, Stanford University
- Monika Henzinger, Google
- Pranam Kolari, Yahoo! Applied Research
- Mark Manasse, Microsoft Research
- Marc Najork, Microsoft Research
- Alexandros Ntoulas, Microsoft Search Labs
- Jan Pedersen, Yahoo! Search
- Erik Selberg, Amazon
- Torsten Suel, Polytechnic University
- Mike Thelwall, University of Wolverhampton
- Baoning Wu, Snap
- Tao Yang, Ask.com
21 Thursday Feb 2008
Posted in Conferences, Homeland Security, Spam
Well, I’m getting ready for my talk this afternoon at University of Turabo. I’ve organized the talk in three parts:
Part 1: Spam and Fraud through Search Engines
Part 2: Gathering Intelligence through Search Engines
Part 3: Identity Theft through Search Engines
A disclaimer will be necessary to indicate that the information to be presented is for educational purposes, only.
This gonna be a nice one. I hope to see old friends.
