WWW Observations
Here I am, blogging almost a week after the conference finished. Well, there is at least one advantage of blogging this late: I can tell you which WWW papers/talks made the biggest impression on me.
The first one was about Exhibit, essentially a set of javascript libraries that enable lightweight data publishing on the web. David Huynh gave a great talk, including a live demo of the tool where he built his own web page with a structured data model behind it in 10 minutes. It’s work done by Huynh, Rob Miller and David Karger at MIT.
The second talk I really liked was about how Google News works. The speaker (Abhinandan Das) described Google’s approach to collaborative filtering for recommendations for users of news articles. He talked about a number of different algorithms for generating these recommendations; the very cool bit was that all of them could be implemented using Google’s massively scalable MapReduce framework.
Overall, the quality of papers, talks, attendees and location made WWW2007 one of the best conferences I’ve been to.
Cheers,
Vladimir Kolovski
