Fabio Crestani

Università della Svizzera Italiana
Faculty of Informatics

Talk Title: Context-aware Distributed Mobile Search

Abstract: Distributed Information Retrieval (DIR) has been around for a while, yet in this talk I will present an approach to using uncooperative DIR in a mobile environment. We called this Unified Mobile Search (UMS). I will present how this concept extends that of DIR by considering fully the context in which the search is carried out and present our first approach to target application selection for mobile devices. I will then expand on this idea toward a conversational assistant for context-aware distributed mobile search, providing a view on what we should expect coming to our mobile phones very soon.

Short Bio: Fabio Crestani is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Informatics of the Universita’ della Svizzera Italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland, since 2007. Previously he was a professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK. He holds a degree in Statistics from the University of Padua (I) and a MSc and PhD in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow (UK).
Prof Crestani is an internationally recognised researcher in Information Retrieval, Text Mining and Digital Libraries. In these areas he has published over two hundred refereed papers on both theoretical and experimental investigations. He has also served in the organising and program committees of several conferences and in the editorial boards of several journals.

Elke Greifeneder

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Institut für Bibliotheks- und Informations­wissen­schaft

Talk Title: Aiuto – ho troppi dati! Digital library users and their challenges with big data

Abstract: Digital libraries have many users: the repository holder, the repositories’ day to day managers, the users who provide big data for storage and use in the digital library, the researchers as end-user who benefit from well large data sets, the industry firm who seeks large, free amounts of data for commercial reuse, and many others. Yet, they all have something in common: the initial enthusiasm for the simple availability of a magic thing called “big data” often changes to an attitude of despair, frustration and defense within months of working with big data. This presentation uses a personal approach and explains the various needs and practices of those user groups, and depicts their pain points when it comes to operating with big data.

Short Bio: Prof. Elke Greifeneder is a full professor at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin. She is leading the research group on information behavior and focuses on methodological questions, in particular on empirical research completed in digital environments. She was tenured in Berlin in 2019 and was previously an assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen. She has been very active in the field as reviewer and program committee member, as well as program chair of the iConference, ASIST chair for International Relations, IFLA section member on library services to people with special needs and has been the co-editor of Library Hi Tech for 10 years.