Keynote Speaker

Professor

University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Time/Location:
Tuesday, 23 October 2018, 09:00AM-10:00AM - Room: Auditorium

Title:
Shifting Information Interactions

Abstract:
Modern information retrieval systems, such as search engines, recommender systems, and conversational agents, are best thought of as interactive systems, that is, systems that interact with and learn from user behavior. The ways in which people interact with information continue to change, with different devices, different presentation formats, and different information seeking scenarios. These changes give rise to new algorithmic and conceptual questions. For instance, how can we learn to rank good results if the display preferences are not known? How might we automatically generate questions to elicit a user’s preferences so that an information retrieval system can adjust its results as efficiently as possible? And how should we understand information seeking dialogues?

Bio:
Maarten de Rijke is University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Information Retrieval at the University of Amsterdam. He holds MSc degrees in Philosophy and Mathematics (both cum laude), and a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science. He worked as a postdoc at CWI, before becoming a Warwick Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, UK. He joined the University of Amsterdam in 1998, and was appointed full professor in 2004. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and a recipient of a Pioneer Personal Innovation grant, the Tony Kent Strix Award, the Bloomberg Data Science Research Award, the Criteo Faculty Research Award, the Google Faculty Research Award, the Microsoft PhD Research Fellowship Award, and the Yahoo Faculty and Research Engagement Program Award as well as a large number of NWO grants. He is the director of the newly established Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence and a former director of Amsterdam Data Science. De Rijke leads the Information and Language Processing Systems group at the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam, one of the world’s leading academic research groups in information retrieval. His research focus is at the interface of information retrieval and artificial intelligence, with projects on online and offline learning to rank, on recommender systems, and on conversational search.