EKAW 2008 Industrial Panel

16th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management

Participatns > Yahoo - Ricardo Beza Yates

Ricardo Baeza-Yates Yahoo! research

Image Ricardo Baeza-Yates is VP of Yahoo! Research for Europe and Latin America, leading the labs at Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile. Until 2005 he was the director of the Center for Web Research at the Department of Computer Science of the Engineering School of the University of Chile; and ICREA Professor at the Dept. of Technology of Univ. Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He is co-author of the book Modern Information Retrieval, published in 1999 by Addison-Wesley, as well as co-author of the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Algorithms and Data Structures, Addison-Wesley, 1991; and co-editor of Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Data Structures, Prentice-Hall, 1992, among more than 150 other publications. He has received the Organization of American States award for young researchers in exact sciences (1993) and with two Brazilian colleagues obtained the COMPAQ prize for the best CS Brazilian research article (1997). In 2003 he was the first computer scientist to be elected to the Chilean Academy of Sciences. During 2007 he was awarded the Graham Medalfor innovation in computing, given by the University of Waterloo to distinguished ex-alumni.

ImageYahoo! Research is the central advanced research organization of Yahoo! Inc., a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. We're responsible for big inventions - our goals are nothing short of inventing the future of the Internet and creating the next generation of businesses for Yahoo!

Image In this short presentation we will cover our attempts to use semantics to improve Web search, including the recent initiative of SearchMonkey as well as using the implicit knowledge of the wisdom of the crowds behind the Web 2.0 and Web usage in general. One of the main challenges for the future is to leverage semantic data without having to resort to people, as people is the main obstacle for achieving the semantic Web.