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Sara Javanmardi, Feb 18, 2012
The Fifth ACM WSDM
took place in Seattle, Washington, USA during February 8-12, 2012. WSDM (pronounced "wisdom") is the premier international ACM conference covering research in the areas of search and data mining on the Web.
This year about 350 people attended, half from academy and half from industry. This was almost double the attendance of the previous year.
The first keynote was given by Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google. He started in May 2002 as a consultant and has been involved in many aspects of the company, including auction design, econometric, finance, corporate strategy and public policy.
It is now possible to acquire real time information on economic variables of interest from various commercial sources. I illustrate how one can use Google Trends data to measure the state of the macroeconomy in various sectors, and discuss some of the ramifications for research and policy.
The second keynote was presented by
Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at bit.ly, where she finds sense in vast data sets. Her work involves both pure research and development of product-focused features.
Abstract: The social web is a messy place! At bitly, we see hundreds of millions of shares and clicks per day-clicks that contain all sorts of wonderful content from lolcats to spacecraft launches. I'll discuss our philosophy, tools, and techniques for looking at the data, and new research opportunities that weren't possible before.
Best Paper Awards:
- Adam Sadilek, Henry Kautz and Jeffrey Bigham won the Best Paper Award for their paper "Finding Your Friends and Following Them to Where You Are".
- Yaron Singer for his Best Student Paper Award for "How to Win Friends and Influence People, Truthfully: Influence Maximization Mechanisms for Social Networks."
WSDM 2013 will be in Rome, Italy. Papers are due August 7, 2012.